


Grounded

by m_class



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Action, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, After-Action Patchup, Angst, Angst with a Hopeful Ending, Away Missions, Banter, Conversations, Discussion of Racism, F/F, Firefights, Flirting, Fluff, Food, Getting Together, Grounding, Hand-To-Hand Combat, Humor, I don't think the violence is that graphic but YMMV, Injury, Jett's fighting style is just yeeting herself at the enemy while swearing, Kissing, M/M, Mentions of Ableism, Mutual Pining, Past Ethical Dilemmas, Philippa Georgiou Lives, Season/Series 02 AU, Shuttle Repairs, Slow Burn, background Hugh Culber/Paul Stamets, better tag safe than tag sorry, feat. Jett attacking an opponent twice her size with her teeth, gratuitous Shakespeare references, m_class’s 2018-2019 completed-WIP collection, universal translator woes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:22:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27373390
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m_class/pseuds/m_class
Summary: Surrounded, outnumbered, and out of contact with the Discovery, Tracy and Jett must fight back-to-back against hostile foes. But as both grapple with experiences from the war and all that has come after it—and Jett grapples with the realization of just how distracting it is when Tracy’s hand brushes her shoulder—it might turn out that salamander aliens are only the beginning of a complicated away mission…and, just maybe, the start of something new.
Relationships: Hugh Culber & Tracy Pollard, Michael Burnham & Jett Reno, Michael Burnham & Philippa Georgiou, Tracy Pollard/Jett Reno
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10





	Grounded

**Author's Note:**

  * For [girlonthelasttrain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlonthelasttrain/gifts).



> Author’s Note
> 
> This is one of a few longer F/F rarepair oneshots I started last winter/spring after my descent into F/F rarepair hell when Jett came on the scene in Season 2. It was supposed to be about 10k (LOL) and I was hoping to finish it last year (LOLOLOL). I decided to complete two of the longer F/F oneshots for my 2018-2019 WIP catchup project, so this is the fifth of six catchup fics and the first of my S2 descent-into-F/F-rarepair-hell longer oneshots to at last be ready to post!
> 
> For girlonthelasttrain—as you know, this is for you with thanks for being a lovely human being/friend <3
> 
> AU Note
> 
> This fic takes place in a Season 2 AU where the full S2 plot either doesn’t happen or happens on a much slower timeframe while the Discovery flies around the quadrant doing less dramatic post-war work; this story starts five or six months after the end of the war. (And yes it’s also a Prime Philippa Lives AU, because why wouldn’t it be. ;)
> 
> I’m still disgusted by what happened to Michael in 2x10, and as I mentioned at the time, [when writing future fics I was going to have to mentally decide](https://starfleetdoesntfirefirst.tumblr.com/post/183788954734/i-really-am-still-just-so-frustrated-and-saddened) whether I was writing in a universe where Michael’s family and friends did torture her to temporary-death or writing in an AU where I gave them a pass by considering that episode not-quite-canon. This is the first fic where that’s directly come up, since it’s in part a fic about what is going wrong on the Discovery, but without S2’s full plot, and in which Jett and Tracy as written would probably both have quit Starfleet if something as bad as 2x10 happened to Michael. Because of that, I decided to split the difference, with an AU where 2x10 didn’t happen but a similar slightly less bad situation did.
> 
> Speaking of sketchy writing decisions, in this AU, Jett didn’t have a wife who was killed in the Klingon war. (FWIW, I don’t object to tragic gay stories in all contexts, but the Star Trek franchise historically has a very bad track record about this and I refuse to dignify the ““canon”” that Jett has a wife who died violently with a place in my fanfic.)
> 
> References
> 
> Tracy’s workshop is a nod to Raven Dauda’s one-woman show, and is also itself a real workshop done by some medical students, though I'm still hunting down the link.
> 
> Tracy’s quotes + modern English versions on No Fear Shakespeare: [first quote,](https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/muchado/page_44/) [second quote](https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/romeojuliet/page_66/)
> 
> FOMO = Fear Of Missing Out
> 
> Paul being a civilian conscript to Starfleet at the beginning of the war comes from one of the Discovery prequel comics (which I haven’t actually read, so I may be garbling that a bit), and Philippa being a former field medic comes from the prequel novel Desperate Measures.
> 
> Additional Content Warnings
> 
> In addition to what’s in the tags and the 2x10-adjacent Michael trauma, there’s a brief PTSD mention and some discussion of coping and treatment for trauma, brief explosion mentions, mentions of alcohol, medical discussion about research, ethics, and caring for patients, problems with medical school, some messy interpersonal dynamics/‘teasing’ gone wrong between other characters, references to stuff from Season 1 (including Ellen’s death and the various bad things that happened to Hugh and Paul) and Season 2 (including Saru asking Michael to kill him and Spock breaking her chessboard), and some general aftermath-of-war discussion. Also, while I do love Hugh/Paul/Culmets very much, their relationship isn’t discussed in a very fluffy light here (I am…simply an F/F writer who wishes to subvert the cross-fandom ubiquity of ‘F/F background pairing making things easier for M/M main pairing,’ even though the Culmets fandom itself isn’t egregious about that, sorry Culmets). And there are two jokes in the transporter room scene about licking things.

“Think they’ll come back?” Jett pants, pointing her phaser into the magenta forest around them.

“No way to know.” Tracy picks herself off the ground, giving her dirt-stained uniform a half-hearted brush with one hand as she holsters her phaser with the other.

After a few more seconds peering into the dark forest, Jett flicks on her phaser’s safety before turning to Tracy, standing behind her in the clearing dappled by lavender sunlight. “You all right, Doc?”

“No injuries,” Tracy confirms. “What about you, Commander?”

“Right as rain,” Jett reports, holstering her own phaser. “We should probably prep for a repeat performance. Food, water, plan our tactics. You still broadcasting for the ship?”

Tracy pulls her tricorder from her belt, checking the readout screen and nodding. “Discovery should see our signal as soon as they get back into orbit.”

She glances skyward, and Jett knows that she, like Jett, is wondering whether or not the tense diplomatic negotiations that pulled the Discovery away from monitoring its away team have escalated into full-out combat.

“The crew’s smart n’ tough,” Jett offers, the reassurance feeling empty on her tongue. “Whatever happens, they can take care of themselves.”

Tracy nods, smiling tightly. “What do you think odds are that they’ll be able to avoid combat?” she asks, an uncharacteristic note of undisguised worry in her voice. Or maybe it’s just exhaustion from unexpected chaos of hand-to-hand combat.

Jett gnaws her lip for a moment, trying to think how to answer. “I don’t know, Doc,” she says gently at last. “I’m a gearhead, not a strategist.” Sighing, she scuffs the dirt with her boot. “From what Burnham said before they had to hop out of orbit, sounded like sorting shit out diplomatically 'n all was possible, but not likely.”

Tracy’s gaze drifts back up to the hazy violet sky, a cloud seeming to pass over her face as her eyes go distant. “Hugh’s in command of sickbay,” she says softly, almost to herself, “if casualties start to roll in.”

Jett bites her lip again, watching her sympathetically. Hugh has always been one Tracy's closest friends on the Discovery, and the guy is barely three months back from the dead. If the negotions do indeed escalate into a shipwide crisis, this will be the first time he’ll be in command during one since coming back on duty.

“The crew’s tough,” Jett offers again, laying a gentle hand on Tracy's arm. “They’ll be all right,”

Tracy nods, her gaze dropping from the sky to meet Jett’s again. “They will,” she says, and her voice, Jett can hear the comfort and carefully-constructed confidence offered to her in return.

Dipping her head in a simple nod of acknowledgement, Jett heads back toward their shuttle, grounded near the side of the clearing. She has popped open the rear storage compartment and is yanking out a container of rations when, out of the corner of her eye, she sees Tracy lightly touching her own arm in exactly the place where Jett’s hand rested.

Huh. Maybe one of their attackers left a bruise there or something. Jett hopes she didn’t make it worse.

“You want the tomato-flavored bar or the blueberry one?” she calls over her shoulder, rummaging through the box.

“Tomato. I’m thinking no knives,” Tracy says, as she walks past Jett to the weapons storage locker, “and no extra phasers. Neither of us have trained on anything other than a phaser or phaser rifle aside from the basics, unless you have some advanced combat training you haven’t told me about, and an extra phaser is nice if you lose yours, but too easy for an opponent to grab off your belt if we end up in another melee situation.”

“I haven’t been holding out on ya,” Jett confirms, tossing Tracy the ration bar. Tracy plucks it from the air in a loose overhand catch as she turns to the locker, and Jett finds herself tracing the motion with her eyes. Tracy has her own special brand of efficient grace, and despite all the time they’ve been spending together these last few months, Jett hasn’t quite realized until this away mission how fascinating it is to simply watch the other woman move through space. “No stabbing training here.”

“Right then,” Tracy says, peering into the locker, and, though Jett can’t see her face, she can hear the amused smile in her voice. “No stabbing today. What about the extra phasers?”

“Second your motion, Doc. More risk than it’s worth,” Jett says, replacing the ration box in the storage container and fishing out two bags of water.

“Well, nothing for us in here, then,” Tracy mutters, sounding vaguely amused as she shuts the doors to the weapons locker, leaving it untouched. “Let’s rest up and plan our tactics.”

Heading back outside into the clearing, she rights a crate knocked over in their skirmish, perching on it and peeling open her ration bar. Jett sits on the crate beside it, handing Tracy her water.

For a few minutes, they sit in silence, eating and glancing periodically around into the woods surrounding the clearing. The long-range scanner in the shuttle and the backup tricorder perched on the sandy dirt of the clearing are set to alert them to the return of the planet’s settlers, but Jett figures it’s probably Human nature to feel like keeping a Human eye out as well.

Based on the information gleaned by the scans they took before their survey mission turned sour, this is an old-growth forest, the magenta trees with their teal foliage interspersed with deep green brambles sprawling across the shady forest floor. The occasional call of a bird floats down from the canopy fifteen meters above them, and in the relative bareness of the clearing, the sunlight filtering through the violet clouds above gently colors everything from dirt and brush and scattered stones to the two Starfleet officers and their regulation grey shuttle into shades of lavender.

“Pre’y enough ‘ere,” Jett comments around a mouthful of artificial blueberry flavor, “if ‘ou care abou’ tha’ kind of thing.”

Tracy snorts, ducking her face away from Jett to wrest control of her expression for a minute before turning. “It is indeed, Commander,” she replies, still with an amused gleam in her eye.

Jett swallows her mouthful of ration bar somewhat sheepishly, smiling as she glances up at the violet sky. “What a mission, eh? A doc and a grease monkey, brawling for their lives against hostile foes, while the professional punchy stabby Security people hang out on their nice cushy starship having space meetings?”

Tracy snorts again; this time, Jett thinks, it’s with Jett rather than at her. “You can say that again.”

Jett sighs. “I am never-bar-never trusting those wiseacres down in cartography and xenoanthropology again. ‘All the settlers live on the eastern part of the continent, Commander; we’ve scanned for lifeforms and there aren’t any humanoids in the forests you’ll be surveying, Commander.’”

Tracy rolls her eyes. “Reno, you know scanning a planet from orbit is less than precise, especially with the kind of interference given off by these oh-so-aesthetically-pleasing clouds.” After a beat, though, she adds, a mischievous gleam in their eyes, “I wouldn’t object to being a fly on the wall when you tell Lorena and Kiki just how wrong they were, though.”

“While wearing the badass bruises to prove it,” Jett says, smirking. “Think Nhan and Georgiou will start listening to me about not blowing their shuttle engines past max now that I’m a bonafide enemy-punching badass?”

“No,” Tracy says, grinning. “They might buy you a drink, though.”

“Ha. They’d better.” Jett stuffs the last of her ration bar in her mouth. “’E goo’ shi’, ’oo, ’ot ’at ’orrible syn’hol Saru uses whe’ever ’e unsta may‘ a toas‘--”

Tracy is laughing so hard that there are tears in her eyes. Jett finishes chewing and swallows before shooting her a mock glare and demanding, “Tracy Pollard, when are you gonna stop giggling at my entirely correct comments?”

Tracy snorts, wiping a tear from her eye. “When I like your favor,” she replies drily, “for God defend the lute should be like the case.”

“No! No!” Jett screetches softly. “No more incomprehensible Shakespeare quotes, you horrible little theatre kid!”

She flails her arms in a universal _quit it_ sign, making Tracy laugh again as she corrects, “Theatre _adult.”_ Tucking her ration bar wrapper into her empty water bag, she explains. “I never was even in a play before Starfleet Academy.”

“Really?” Jett asks, immediately curious. “How’d you find time to become a theatre kid, ‘scuse me, theatre _adult_ at the academy? I thought pre-med 'n med school were supposed to be a beast.”

“Ha.” Tracy tears open her water packet, smiling grimly. “Oh, they are, though at least we’ve made some progress from the bad old days when med school and residency were set up in such a way that they’d very literally destroy people’s health.” She sighs. “At any rate, I wasn’t doing extracurricular theatre. I can’t even imagine doing my theatre friends’ pre-production ‘hell week’ on top of med school.” She winces. “Though some of my cohort did manage it. Not me, though; I did a Medicine and Theatre subconcentration, so I was in it for the course credit,” she finishes with a grin.

“Yeah, I’m sure you were _just_ in it for the course credit, nerd.” Having been distracted by the low-hanging insult opportunity, it takes Jett a minute for the rest of what Tracy said to sink in. “Wait, ‘Medicine and Theatre?’ As in, like, them having stuff to do with each other?”

Tracy chuckles at her bemused expression. “Action and observation, dialogue and information exchange, culture and bias, the position of bodies in space…”

Jett raises an eyebrow, fascinated despite herself. “Point taken. Tracy Pollard of Starfleet School of Medicine, bringing her classmates Shakespeare In The Hospital instead of Shakespeare In The Park, eh?”

“Believe it or not,” Tracy says with a wry grin, tipping her water packet back to swallow the last of the water, “my thesis for my subconcentration didn’t have anything to do with Shakespeare. I helped put on a workshop I'd read about from other schools.” Her hands fly through the air as she explains. “Speaking of masks, we put everyone in small groups to rehearse simple scenarios, like a mother and daughter talking, while wearing full theatre masks; each group took turns performing for the rest of the workshop, and the ‘audience’ talked about what we’d observed during each scenario. It was interesting what people would pick up on, especially when it wasn’t what the actors had consciously intended or wasn’t in the script.”

Jett tilts her head, taking in this latest bit of intriguing Tracy theatre-kid weirdness. “To make you, what, more observant?”

Tracy nods. “There were all kinds of ideas behind the project, really. Helping future healthcare professionals learn to see the whole patient; the whole situation. And working on biases, through what we’d assume about a bare-bones character like ‘husband’ or ‘parent’ or 'daughter.’ And…” She sighs as she stands, brushing again at her dust-ingrained uniform jacket. “Just...observing the way people interact in space—space-space, I mean, not intersteller space—and how much changes when you can’t see the other person’s eyes. Those of us who are able to read facial expressions tend to rely a lot on doing so, and when you cover the whole face, that changes. Lots of different ideas, I suppose,” she finishes, adding with a grin, “and I’m sure younger-me tried to write a thesis paragraph about each one.”

“Pretty nifty,” Jett admits, raising an eyebrow. “We didn’t do anything like that in engineering track, that’s for damn sure.”

Tracy laughs, giving Jett a pat on the shoulder as she heads for the shuttle with her empty ration bar and water packaging. “Ready to plan our tactics, Commander?”

As Jett crumples her own ration bar into a ball, she can feel a strange hyper-awareness of the way Tracy’s hand felt on her shoulder. Speaking of the way people interact in space, the brief swat of Tracy’s fingers against Jett’s shoulder keep replaying over and over in Jett’s mind, a strangely vivid sensory memory that has her hand drifting up to her shoulder as though to touch the place Tracy touched--

_Oh._

Oh, _shit._

Warm blossoms in Jett’s stomach, as though it has been waiting for her awareness to fully unspool inside her, and she gulps, staring fixedly at the forest in front of her.

How long has this been going on?

She’s been eating the odd meal with Tracy for months; has hit it off with her from the moment they started wisecracking with each other during Jett’s first medical exam after hitching a ride off the Hiawatha. And it isn’t as though she’s been unaware of her latent attraction to the woman in an _I’d-say-yes-if-she-made-a-move_ sort of way, but the same could have been said for a half-dozen of Jett’s friendly acquaintances on the Discovery. Tracy is kind and level-headed and sarcastic and breathtakingly competent, not to mention pretty easy on the eyes, but that same constellation of qualities is true of plenty of people who Jett is pretty sure she could receive a casual pat on the shoulder from without her shoulder feeling as it’s been brushed by a strand of stellar nebula.

Jett stares after Tracy numbly, her mind racing over her interactions with her over the past few months as though she is re-watching a movie with new awareness of its plot twist. When did her feelings toward Discovery’s medical division’s third-in-command move from friendly colleague-ship to…this?

She has, she reflects, come to see her meals with Tracy as…she thinks of the sensation she feels when they set their trays down together on one of Discovery’s mess hall tables, settling onto the hard plastic chairs and relaxing into conversation with each other. Connection. Warmth. A kind of—time out, she realizes, from her time interacting with so much of the rest of the Discovery crew.

While Jett has come to care deeply for many her crewmates on the Discovery over the course of her six months there, there is a sliver of coldness that runs through their community like rust through a poorly maintained water main, something that Jett might charitably call compassion fatigue if she hadn’t had days on the Hiawatha when she’d been too worn to feel even a sliver of actual warm gooey compassion for the patients in her charge, and kept caring for them anyway.

And then there was what happened last month.

Jett sighs.

Maybe that thread of undefinable coldness is some lingering effect of Discovery’s time in that janky parallel universe, a trip that Jett found out about the night Gen and Airiam got wasted to Alpha Centauri and back on Saurian brandy and gave her all the gory details. Or maybe other Starfleet crews are like this now as well, and it’s a legacy of the war, one that Jett happened to escape via her little vacation on an uncharted asteroid.

Or maybe it’s simply part of the culture of the ship, the way cultures and mores have varied from ship to ship and crew to crew as long as Jett has been in Starfleet. When it was commissioned, Discovery was staffed with the best of the best. But, much like Jett would ask the technical salesperson of a “precision-engineered” product whether it was the product's measurements, fidelity, calibration, or something else that had been designed to be _precise_ , “best” is an adjective slippery in its genericness. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the USS Discovery was staffed with people that the leaders of a wartime Starfleet had defined as the best of the best, with _best at what_ a question that now lingers.

Regardless of its causes, Jett’s time with Tracy has been a welcome respite from the sometimes wearing chill, and if Tracy happens to have the loveliest eyes this side of the quadrant, well, getting to gaze into them is just a nice side benefit of spending time with her, and listening to her beautiful laugh, and—

Oh, shit. Yes, this has been going on for a while.

Or—it’s not like this is, in fact, an unpleasant realization, Jett reflects as she watches Tracy rummage through the shuttle, aside, perhaps, from the less-than-ideal timing.

Not oh shit? Maybe oh shit?

Well, no matter what, this has certainly been building in the back of Jett’s mind and heart and…other parts…for a while.

And now…

Jett feels like she’s been hit with a starship as the memory of Tracy touching her own arm in the spot Jett touched whams against her consciousness. Does Tracy…might she also…

“Commander?”

“Yeah?” Jett jumps slightly as the voice of the woman herself comes from beside her, her voice coming out with an uncharacteristic squeak to it, and she gives herself a mental shake. She is Jett Reno, gearhead, engineering commander, sometime-amateur-surgeon, and veteran of plenty of longterm relationships. She does not _squeak_.

Tracy steps around to look her in the face, brow furrowed in mild concern. “I asked if you were ready to plan our tactics. You all right, Commander?”

“Hunky-dorey, Doc,” Jett says. The squeak is gone. _Thank you, voicebox._ “Just thinking about how to fix the busted shuttle console if we’re down here more than a few more hours.”

Fortunately, Tracy seems to buy this, perhaps having worked with enough researchers and engineers over the years to be accustomed to occasionally competing for attention against their technical conundrums.

“Right.” She nods, glancing at the forest around them. “Tactics. Thoughts?”

“I figure the best course of action would be to get in the center of the clearing; fight back to back,” Jett says. “We’ll be able to cover each other, and hey, if I were these fuckers and _I_ was coming back to try to kill us, I’d try surrounding the clearing this time, so it’s not like it’s likely we’ll only be dealing with a frontal attack, anyway.”

Tracy nods. “Agreed.” Her fingers lightly brush the phaser at her side as she glances into the forest again, then up at the sky. Though her expression is unruffled, the gesture is poignant. Jett wonders who she’s thinking of up there; if she’s wondering, between their potential battle in the sky and Tracy and Jett’s peril on the ground, if she’ll ever have a chance to see them again.

Somehow, this thought is what makes it sink in for Jett the level of danger they are truly in, the memory of Tracy knocked to the ground and pivoting just in time to send a glancing phaser blast at her attacker rising sharp and vivid to the forefront of her mind.

She takes a deep breath, glancing up at the sky in turn as she shoves one of the crates closer to the edge of the shuttle with her shin.

As Tracy turns to grab the other, Jett pictures Tracy’s friends and colleagues—Hugh, Paul, Íris, Burnham, Georgiou, Jake, Klaudija, Mahmoud, Ivy, Britta, Dayamai, even ol’ Lorena until Jett does her in for crimes against cartography.

Silently, she promises them, _I’ll bring her back to you._

“And now we wait,” Tracy says with a wry smile, glancing reflexively back at the proximity sensor again as she perches on the crate and leans back against the shuttle bulkhead, fingers brushing against the hilt of her phaser again.

“Yep,” Jett replies, quirking an eyebrow as she checks to make sure her own phaser is still set to stun before holstering it again. “Not quite how I thought this Saturday was gonna go, eh?”

Tracy looks intrigued. “Wouldn’t have taken you for the type who keeps track of any of Earth’s calendars, Reno.”

“Eh.” Jett shrugs one shoulder up and down. “Don’t exactly have much of a fuzzy sentimental connection to Earth weeks, but old habits die hard, I guess.”

“Not always the pragmatist after all,” Tracy says with a grin, and Jett can feel her stomach flutter.

“Don’t know,” she admits with a lopsided smile. “It’s always been part and parcel with being pragmatic, to me. Hanging on to the little things. Some of ‘em, anyway.”

Before Tracy can reply with more than the beginning of a nod, the proximity alert goes off.

Reaching forward to silence it, Tracy gets to her feet, removing the phaser from her belt. Jett echoes her motions.

“Take care of yourself, Pollard,” she says softly.

Tracy nods. “You too, Reno.”

There is a sound from somewhere in the forest, and Jett takes a deep breath, feeling her heartrate increase at the prospect of what seems likely to be hand-to-hand combat more intense than anything she’s yet experienced throughout her many years in Starfleet. Making their way to the center of the clearing, they step into position back-to-back to wait.

Jett knows people who have reported that adrenaline is a turn-on, but that’s never been the case for Jett, who has always wondered how anyone can have the brainspace to get hot and bothered in the middle of a crisis, and filed it away as a ‘two kinds of people in the galaxy’ thing. For Jett, hunger, pain, and, yes, those feelings as well are typically muted by the adrenaline and focus of a crisis.

Which means that her sharp, shimmery awareness of Tracy’s shoulderblades against hers is intense enough to cut through a hell of a lot of focus, planning, fear of death, et cetera.

Her attention is pulled from these ruminations by a glint of motion through the trees. “Movement at my ten o’clock,” she reports in a low voice.

“Understood.”

The ridiculousness of this whole situation hits Jett again as she takes a deep breath in and out, raising her phaser. A doctor and a grease monkey, about to take on a bunch of hostile aliens like…

A fitting pop cultural or historical reference eludes her. Did Thelma and Louise fight aliens? It’s been a long time since she’s seen that film.

“Movement at my twelve o’clock,” Tracy says quietly, then makes a soft _ahp_ noise of controlled realization. “And my ten. And my two.”

“Right,” Jett mutters back. “Let’s show ‘em what we’re made of, huh?”

“A collection of carbon-based cells that aren’t aiming to die?”

Jett bites back a grin. “Sounds about right.”

The first of the tall, salamander-like attackers bursts through the trees with her weapon raised, and Jett stuns her with a blast to the chest. She hears a crashing noise behind her, and surmises that Tracy has downed another hostile, and then, a few seconds later, another.

In front of Jett, two more enemies catapult themselves into the clearing. Jett stuns the first but misses the second, the beam from her phaser shooting past the being’s shoulder as she lunges forward toward Jett, and Jett lunges forward instinctively to meet her, taking the fight away from Tracy, who, Jett is dimly aware, is still firing behind her.

The being, who has at least half a meter of height on Jett, swipes a hard punch against Jett’s ribs as Jett’s blow glances off her jawline, sending Jett thudding against the hard ground, her phaser bouncing away from her toward the treeline. Leaping back to her feet, Jett tackles her just as she is leveling her weapon at Tracy, and the shot goes wild, zinging over Tracy and her attackers’ heads into the leafy canopy above them.

Jett’s momentum wasn’t enough to send her intended victim to the ground, however, merely sending her lurching off her balance as Jett clings to her, pinning her arms to her sides. She claws at Jett, making a frustrated but unexpectedly high-pitched growling noise. Jett, realizing that she is successfully preventing her from reaching any of her weapons by keeping her arms pinned to her sides, hangs on tightly, refusing to let go. The being’s skin is slimy, her sharp teeth knashing in frustration as she glares down at her smaller, Human attacker.

Jett headbutts her in the ribs without much optimism. The being ignores the blow entirely, struggling for another moment to free her arms before thundering toward a tree at the edge of the clearing. Jett realizes her intention milliseconds too late to let go.

Jett’s attacker smacks Jett’s back and skull against the tree with an impact that feels as though it cracks open the universe. For a few seconds, sparking darkness fills Jett’s vision, but as the stars clear from her eyes, she realizes with more than a little surprise that she has managed to maintain her grip. Her erstwhile attacker looks somewhat nonplussed as well, and for a moment, they stare blankly at each other before the attacker shifts her weight, preparing to smack Jett against the tree again.

“Oh no you don’t, motherfucker,” Jett growls, opening her mouth and biting down hard on her slimy shoulder.

The being howls in surprised pain, and Jett lets go, scrambling across the clearing to retrieve her phaser. Diving for it, she spins and sends a shot toward her former attacker, who is now heading towards Tracy.

Evidently now disarmed as well, Tracy is trading punches and kicks with the one remaining enemy on her side of the clearing, and Jett forces herself to take the extra half-second it takes her to aim properly before firing at her own former opponent. Her first shot misses, but her second hits the being square in the back, and she collapses into a heap.

Jett aims at Tracy’s current adversary, but before she can fire, the being knocks Tracy to the ground with a well-placed kick and leaps toward her, a hand going for the knife at her belt.

For a frozen fraction of a second, Jett’s mind is caught between two choices—fire a phaser blast that will fully disable Tracy’s adversary if it hits, but have no effect at all if it misses, or run at her, an attack that won’t miss but won’t be any more disabling than Jett’s other unarmed tackle was.

It is the second option that is guaranteed to keep Tracy alive, if only for a few more seconds.

Jett runs at the alien and collides with her hard, this time unable to grip on as the momentum of two beings colliding with each other from opposite directions sends both of them thudding to the ground, winded to the core. Jett gags, sucking air into her lungs before shoving herself to her feet as the other being rises in front of her.

“I will fucking kill you, tiny being,” the attacker spits at her, the melodic tones of her voice at odds with the meaning of the words spat mechanically from the universal translator clipped to Jett’s jacket. “I will kill you, then kill your friend, then rip your craft into pieces, then throw the pieces into—”

“Oh, get fucked,” Jett grumbles, and dives for the being’s ankles.

With a yelp of surprise, she tries to dodge out of Jett’s way, but Jett is already colliding with her shins, dodging a clumsy kick that only serves to throw the other being further off balance as Jett yanks hard, jerking her off her feet and sending her crashing to the ground. Jett scrambles toward her on hands and knees, yanking the knife that she was going to use on Tracy from her belt and holding it to her throat.

“You just stay right th—”

The alien’s hand moves faster than Jett would have thought possible, flying through the air and grabbing Jett’s knife hand before squeezing with a grip like iron, and Jett feels a small, agonizing, yet somehow anticlimactic _pop_ as something in her hand breaks. The knife falls from her limp fingers to the ground. Gasping through the pain, Jett jabs her knee into the being’s ribcage, but the being’s other hand comes up to punch Jett hard in the side of the head, turning Jett’s vision once again to sparks for the moment it takes her to flip Jett onto the ground. Grabbing the dropped knife, she swings it towards Jett’s throat.

Lavender sunlight glints off the blade as it swoops toward Jett, her attacker’s face filling her suddenly-blurry field of vision, until, suddenly, her attacker’s eyes go blank, the knife falling limply from her hand before she crashes to the ground beside Jett. Jett blinks, gasping for breath and blinking residual sparks from her eyes.

Tracy is standing over them, holding a phaser.

Jett exhales, and for a moment, doctor and engineer stare at each other, drinking in each other’s faces in the sudden silence of the clearing.

“Nice shooting, Doc,” Jett manages at last, rubbing her eyes as Tracy bends over her, offering her a hand up.

“Nice tackling, Commander,” Tracy returns, raising an eyebrow as Jett attempts to place her good hand in the spot where she’s pretty sure Tracy’s hand is, only to miss, blink, and swipe hopefully toward it again. “But why don’t you just stay still for now?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Jett groans as she lays back, watching the treetops spin and swirl gently above her as Tracy’s footsteps retreat to the shuttle and return to her side. She can hear the click of the medkit being opened, and then Tracy is scanning her with a medical tricorder, calmly explaining to Jett what she’s about to do as she replaces it in the kit and pulls out a regenerator multi-tool, her words swirling up into the blurry sky.

Tracy passes the regenerator over Jett’s head, the quiet whirr of the instrument’s sensors soon replaced by the soft hum as it does its work. Jett closes her eyes with a slight groan; it isn’t as though she can exactly _feel_ the swelling in her head decreasing, but she can feel _something_ , and her body doesn’t know what to make of it. Distantly, she can hear the click of other tools and Tracy still talking, the words of her explanation sliding over each other like water in a stream as the throbbing pain in Jett’s hand grows hot and itchy and then fades away.

Jett’s thoughts settle back into place as she blinks a few times, cautiously flexing her hand. When she opens her eyes, her vision is clear again, and Tracy is scanning her head with the tricorder, smiling. “Your hand should be good as new, and your concussion is all gone for now, though we’ll have you report to sickbay before you go to sleep tonight to make sure there’s no residual swelling. Since the rapid regeneration process for a head injury can be a little disorienting, I’m going to have you lie still and take it easy for another ten minutes. In the meantime,” she finishes, unzipping a bag of safety ties, “I’m going to restrain our friends here, and check around for any serious injuries.”

“Thanks, Doc,” Jett murmurs, adding, “Gimme a phaser, just in case someone wakes up quick and you need backup?”

Tracy smiles, and her footsteps retreat and return again, the cool surface of a phaser meeting Jett’s hand. “I’ll give you a shout.”

For what seems like a short eternity, Jett lies on the forest floor watching Tracy carefully bind the hands and feet of their foes before making another circuit to scan each of them with the medical tricorder. She crouches at the side of two of them for longer than the rest, but seems satisfied after a second scan of the first and a quick examination of the second’s shoulder, rising to her feet and making her way back across the clearing to Jett’s side.

“That one took two phaser blasts,” she says in response to Jett’s curious look, “but her scans came out fine; no adverse effects. I needed to check the one you, erm, bit as well since humanoids are quite capable of transmitting disease to each other as much as any other mammal, but you don’t appear to have broken the skin.”

Jett coughs a laugh that feels somewhere between sheepish and hysterical as Tracy continues, “No serious injuries, either, though some of them are definitely going to be feeling this fight in the morning.”

Coming from someone else, the words might have sounded like a boast, but in Tracy’s voice it’s a simple observation, devoid of any gloating or, on the flip side, the breathy concern that Jett can imagine coming from someone a little over-invested in being forgiving towards the people who were just trying to stab them both in the throat. Jett has met a few of the latter—and plenty of the former—over the course of her career in Starfleet, and finds neither mentality particularly encouraging.

Tracy lowers herself back to sit at Jett’s side, punching a button on the tricorder and turning it to scan herself. “You’ve got four minutes to go til I feel safe letting you sit up, Commander. I’m going to make sure I don’t have any injuries I don’t know about, and then we’ll see about fixing up all those bruises,” she says, eyeing Jett.

“Thanks, Doc,” Jett murmurs again, relaxing back to stare up once again into the sky above them. Now properly unblurred and unmoving, the treetops are almost unbearably beautiful in the lavender sunlight. Or maybe it’s just the way they frame Tracy’s face as she scans herself, her expression softly focused as the tricorder hums away. Jett stares, drinking in the site of her again, safe and alive and unharmed but for the bloody scratch pulling at the corner of her lip and the dirt smeared across the front of her formerly-white uniform, suggesting more than a few aches and bruises beneath.

“Hey,” Jett interjects gently as Tracy reaches for the medkit. “If you can wait another four minutes, I can help you with that cut on your face.”

While it’s entirely possible to use a regenerator on oneself, Jett has always considered doing so to be a pain in the ass, not to mention a little nervewracking, even with modern regeneration auto-mapping technology, particularly when it comes to healing anything on a part of the body as delicate and visible as the face.

Particularly when it comes to healing anything as delicate and visible as _Tracy’s_ beautiful face.

“That’s gotta be stinging when you talk,” she continues, “and I don’t want you to get up to your elbows fixing my ouchies before we fix it.”

“You’re already lying down, Reno,” Tracy says firmly, pulling the regenerator out again, though out of the corner of Jett’s eyes she notices the tip of Tracy’s tongue gingerly give the bloody cut an exploratory poke as she does so. “No reason not to go ahead and fix you up.”

“Yeah, but I’m only stuck lying on my ass for another four minutes. Gotta be more like three minutes, now. And fixing my numerous but very minor bruises is gonna take longer than that. Why don’t we just hang on til I can fix you up, huh?”

“All right, you win, Reno,” Tracy says with a sigh, though she’s smiling as she replaces the regenerator in the medkit. “Are all engineers so solicitous of their injured colleagues,” she asks, voice gently teasing, “or is it only the ones who’ve spent half of a war on a space rock advancing field critical-care technology by five to ten years?”

Jett blinks, abruptly taken aback. “Advancing field medical technology by _what now?”_

Tracy’s eyebrows lift in surprise. “You spent a week on Earth doing a handoff of your patients and talking to Starfleet Medical, didn’t you? Surely they’ve been telling you how many papers they’ve been getting out of your innovations? With full credit, of course. Frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t been receiving fan mail.”

Jett chews her lip for a long moment. “Well, I wouldn’t call it _fan mail.”_

Tracy’s eyebrows lift yet further. “Reno. You’ve been _receiving fan mail_ and you _still_ haven’t twigged to just how momentous your work was?”

“I mean, momentous in keeping my patients alive, yeah,” Jett mumbles, chewing her lip again. “But I’m an engineer; I came back onto Discovery and went back to good old-fashioned engine repairs. I’ve gotten a few complimentary letters, sure, but—” She gazes up at Tracy, curious despite herself. “You said five to ten _years_? You’ve gotta be exaggerating, right? Like, how does one person do that? That’s not how science works. Is it?”

“Not usually, no,” Tracy accedes. “But the circumstances of your foray into field medicine were hardly usual. Advances in the methods and technology we have for the longterm treatment of critical-care patients outside of an actual level-one trauma facility result from either formal research projects or emergency advances made in situations like yours. But timeline-wise, bluntly, the former are not carried out with the urgency of your, ha, research, not to mention that given the obvious ethical bar on trying stopgap measures on real patients outside of an actual emergency, many ‘new methods’ remain primarily theoretical for some time. As for the latter, well—equally bluntly, it’s rare for situations to arise in which patients in critical condition _are_ kept alive for so long outside of an appropriate facility.” She shakes her head, her eyes serious. “For you, someone with no more than any other Starfleet servicemember’s first-aid training, to innovate techniques to keep almost all of your patients alive for a year in a damaged sickbay—what you did was anything _but_ usual, Reno. And it isn’t just the people who were in your care who have you to thank for being alive. There’ll be other lives saved by your innovations as well.” She smiles slightly, the expression in her eyes still gently somber. “I’m not surprised you’ve been getting fan mail.”

Something uncomfortable twists inside Jett at Tracy's words, and a wave of relief rises in her at the soft _ding_ of the timer on Tracy’s tricorder and its welcome change of subject. She levers herself upright, holding her hand out for the regenerator. “Let’s get your face healed up.”

For a few minutes, there is silence; Tracy unspeaking as the regenerator mends the cut at the side of her lip; Jett unspeaking as she concentrates on the mending of it.

“All set, Doc,” she says at last, and Tracy smiles, poking at the now-healed spot with her tongue again.

“Thanks, Commander.”

Jett smiles back at her, lowering herself back to the alien earth. “ _Now_ I’m ready for ya to have at my bruises.”

Tracy lifts the regenerator. “Well,” she says, voice teasing, as she begins to work, “it’d certainly be my honor to fix up the bruises of someone who’s advanced field medical technology by five to ten years.”

Jett must let something show on her face, however, because Tracy’s smile drops off her face instantly. “I’m sorry,” she says gently, lowering the regenerator to give Jett her full attention. “I didn’t mean to make light of a horrible situation. I should have thought before I spoke.”

Jett shakes her head quickly. “No. No, it’s not that; I know you’re not making light of the fact that it happened.”

One of Jett’s patients didn’t make it, even after transfer back to all the resources of Starfleet Medical. Tracy knows that. Tracy knows that, and Tracy would never dismiss the Hiawatha, or what it means.

“I know you wouldn’t do that,” Jett continues, trying to keep her voice steady and reassuring. “It should be okay to joke a nice compliment about me advancing technology, _look at the engineer, doing her engineer thing._ You’re all good, Doc. You’re all good.”

Tracy tilts her head to the side, searching Jett’s face. “If ‘it’s’ not that,” she echoes softly, “what is ‘it?’”

Damn. Jett chews her lip. “It’s nothing. Not a big deal, I mean. Just, you know, people are always gonna be people, and—hey, I don’t wanna turn your ear in the middle of an active away mission, Pollard. I can complain to you about people being people over lunch any day of the week.” And hopefully, Jett privately reflects, amid everything else that has happened on this away mission, this particular topic of conversation will be lost in the shuffle.

 _Everything else that has happened on this away mission—_ Jett gulps silently at the memory of her earlier revelation. Now _that’s_ a topic she will have to sort out whether she wants to deal with it or not, that’s for sure, but at least, for all its weight, it’s a somewhat more pleasant one.

“All right, Reno,” Tracy says, though she still sounds concerningly concerned as she lifts the regenerator again. “You just lie back and relax while I get your bruises fixed up.”

Jett closes her eyes as the regenerator works, feeling too exhausted, suddenly, even to want to appreciate that beautiful way that concentration shapes Tracy’s face as she waves the regenerator over Jett’s injuries.

The settler standing over Tracy; the blade flashing toward Jett’s throat; the knowledge that their ship is somewhere up there, perhaps in grave danger without them...

And now, fresh in her mind, the PADD in her quarters with its admiring letters tucked into a folder of her portion of the database…

Jett sighs, trying to think of nothing but the incongruously gentle breeze playing over her face like a caress, and she must succeed to some degree, because no more unpleasant emotions rise in her before Tracy is saying, “That should be you all fixed up, then.”

Jett smiles, pushing herself upright and twisting and turning her torso experimentally. “Sure do feel good as new, Doc.”

Tracy smiles. “Glad to hear it.”

“You ready?”

Tracy nods, and Jett holds out her hand for the tricorder, feeling her own tongue poke out of her mouth in concentration as she lets it do its work, mapping and then mending the bruises and abrasions scattered beneath Tracy's uniform.

“How's it feel?” she asks, as the tricorder whirrs cheerfully to a stop.

Tracy smiles, stretching and twisting in turn. “Good as new."

Faced with no immediately pressing tasks for the first time since the attack began, they are both silent for a moment, sitting companionably next to each other as a gentle breeze rustles the underbrush of the magenta forest around them.

“It really is,” Tracy says softly, and Jett shoots her a questioning look. “What you said earlier. Pretty here.” Voice teasing, she adds, “‘If you care about that kind of thing.’”

Jett smirks. “I’m just the grease monkey, Pollard. I worry first about whether the environment’s gonna further fuck up our crashed ship, next about the subtle interplay of the light through the blah-blah-blah.”

“Yes, you truly have an an artist’s eye for the beauty around you,” Tracy deadpans.

Something flutters in Jett’s chest at the perfection of Tracy’s dry humor, the other woman’s eyes meeting Jett’s and shining with the shared joy and comfort of being in on the joke together even as her words mock Jett’s exaggerated pragmatism.

“I don’t know, Pollard,” Jett says softly, holding her gaze. “I think I do have quite an eye for the beauty around me.”

Tracy holds Jett’s gaze for a moment longer, one eyebrow raising a fraction of a millimeter, before dropping her gaze to smile down at her hands. “We should probably get back to work on those shuttle repairs,” she says, reaching for the medkit and checking the arrangement of its contents briefly before closing it and getting to her feet. “I’m no gearhead, but I can sit by you and hand you tools. There’s nothing more we’ll need to do for our friends here—” She jerks her chin toward the crumpled forms around them— “until it’s time for another medical check in half an hour or so, and we’ll still be able to hear the proximity alarms from inside our shuttle’s guts.”

Jett grins, clambering to her own feet and following Tracy as she turns toward the shuttle. “Sounds like a plan, Doc.”

For the first few minutes after Jett pops the paneling off the aft engine compartment and worms her way into the compartment to begin checking for burnt-out relays, they work in silence, Tracy placing the occasional tool in Jett’s hand as promised. Even as she focuses on the task at hand, Jett can hear the other woman begin to drum her fingers lightly against the deck beside her, an anxious rhythm that reminds Jett that, while Jett has the distraction of the contrary relays, Tracy no longer has either ass-kicking or doctoring to take her mind off the situation as a whole.

Jett considers what to say for a few more minutes before she speaks. At this point, it’s been a solid four hours since they last heard from the Discovery. Jett can feel the cold fear quietly gathering in the pit of her stomach at the thought of what Hugh and Paul and Linus and Burnham and Ramirez and all the rest might be going through up there. If they haven’t already been fucking vaporized by the vast warships circling them.

A mood-lightening joke about how their crewmates are having all the fun without them doesn’t quite seem to fit.

“Yaknow,” she says bluntly, after Tracy places another wrench in her hand, “I figure this is just about the worst part of being on a starship. The times when you’re _not_ on a starship, or you’re _there_ but laid up in sickbay or whatever, and you know that whatever’s happening to your friends at this moment, you can’t do a damn thing about it.”

“I’d certainly second that, Commander,” Tracy says quietly, after a short pause. “And as a Starfleet medical professional, I can confirm,” she adds, “that helping patients to manage the distress you cite at being in sickbay during times of danger is something we study and discuss specifically.”

Inside the panel, Jett raises an intrigued eyebrow, even though Tracy can't see it. “Kinda like survivor’s guilt crossed with the world’s worst FOMO for Starfleet do-gooders, eh?”

Jett can hear the amused smile in Tracy’s voice as she replies, “Not exactly the way it’s described in the medical texts, but—yes. For many people—and particularly the type of person who joins Starfleet—there’s a lot of very real pain in being unable to help one’s crew or the people in the galaxy around them when they’d be quite capable of doing so if not for this _one pesky_ broken leg...or illness...or the fact that they’re bleeding out all over the sickbay floor and the trauma team is taking up their valuable time by trying to save their life.”

The genuine sympathy in her voice goes wry at the end, and Jett thinks of the many crewmates she has known who regard a stay in sickbay as an embarrassing hindrance to their true calling of charging around trying to save the ship, no matter how grievously they themselves have been harmed. “I know better than to assume you’re exaggerating.”

“I have stories.”

Jett snorts.

“At any rate,” Tracy adds, her voice going soft again, “being unable to help the people you care about…it’s not an easy thing.” She sighs, and Jett can hear a rustle as she changes position, or maybe scrubs a hand against her face or down her arm, her voice resuming its normal pitch as frustration twines around fear. “I think my blood pressure climbs higher every hour that damn communicator doesn’t go off.”

“Yeah.” Jett worms her arm out of the opening in the panel, depositing the wrench on the ground with a clink. “Soldering iron?”

“You still have your safety goggles on, right?”

“Right.”

“And the vent fan is running? I know, I know, you wouldn’t solder without it, but I can’t hear it myself from out here.”

“Yeah, it’s running.”

The cool metal of the soldering iron slides into Jett's hand, and Jett smiles despite herself as she pulls it into her ersatz cavern, feeling a bit like a dragon surrounded by a hoard of fritzing engine systems. A dragon with someone perched outside its cavern looking out for it. “Thanks for looking out of me, Doc.”

“Thanks for looking out for _me_ , Reno,” Tracy returns, voice quiet again. “It’s…not the easiest for most 'fleet personnel to start a conversation about this kind of thing, in any way shape or form.” She hesitates. “Even I…” A sigh. “Professionally, I’m a physician, not a counselor. And personally…well. I’m as liable as anyone else to let tension climb higher and higher in a situation like this without being brave enough to break the ice.”

Jett blinks, pausing before starting the iron so that she can give Tracy’s words more mental RAM. _Brave?_ Tracy thinks her hesitant bitching about the sheer shitty awfulness of knowing their crew is in danger is _brave?_

Well. It _was_ just about hardest thing she’s had to figure out how to say aloud this away mission. Maybe Tracy has a point.

And, well, she _certainly_ is correct that Jett cares about looking out for her...

“Eh, well, yaknow,” Jett mumbles, feeling her face flush warm in the darkness, “desperate times and yada yada ya.” Chewing her lip for a moment, she almost adds, _I don’t want you to be alone with this. Of course I don’t._ but then thinks better of it, flicking on the soldering iron and turning her attention to the busted wiring. No need to risk being so sappy as to be obnoxious.

Tracy snorts, and Jett smiles as she finesses the wrent solder over a corner of a square fixture, relieved to be back on more solid ground.

“I suppose I should never be surprised,” Tracy adds, a smile in her voice, as a stray bead of solder tries to escape down the side of the fixture, “when you’re one to do brave kind things, Reno. From what I've heard, after what you did during the war you have something of a sector-wide rep for your compassion.”

Jett cranes her elbow upward and twists her wrist forward to corral the escaping bead of solder, blinking a drop of sweat from her eye as the business end of the iron moves closer to her face in the cramped space. “I hate that shit,” she mutters without thinking, squinting at the shimmer of re-liquifying solder in the dim light.

From outside the engine compartment, Tracy makes a startled sound. “What?”

So much for solid ground. Jett groans to herself as she flicks off the iron. “Sorry, Doc. Just grumblin.’ Not a big deal.” Desperately, she tries to think of what tool she might plausibly need next in order to effect a change of subject. There isn’t one, really; there’s one more control box to solder here and then she’s on to the next panel. She doesn’t have any more tools she needs to ask for.

 _But!_ she realizes, sudden and glorious relief sweeping through her. _Tracy is a doctor, not an engineer! She won’t_ know _that!_

“Can you hand me the, uh, the five-millimeter wrench?”

Tracy slides the wrench into her hand, and Jett pulls it hastily into the darkened crawlspace, heart pounding. Laying the hand holding the unneeded wrench against her chest, she stares up into the darkness.

As seconds pass in silence, Jett’s heartrate beginning to calm and the sweat on her face steadily cooling in the wind of the ventilation fan, she begins to feel somewhat stupid for the length she has gone to to compulsively change the subject.

“Reno?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry for bringing it up again,” Tracy says quietly. “Whatever ‘it’ is,” she adds, a touch of wry affection creeping in her tone. “I didn’t realize talking about your reputation would bump up against the same...thing...as earlier, but I should’ve thought about that before I gave you basically the same kind of compliment again.”

“No! No, Pollard, you’re--it’s fine,” Jett says hastily. “You didn’t do anything wrong.” Fuck. “You--it’s not your fault that you’re trying to compliment me and it’s going wrong, like--fuck, it’s like--” Jett screws her face up in the darkness, trying to marshal some coherent words together. “Like, I had a colleague, once, who had a PTSD trigger of people being kind to her when she tripped or hurt herself or anything like that, and so once she told us that, we knew that if an accident happened to just, like, check super neutrally if she needed medical attention, and if she didn’t, to just not say anything else, and let her take care of it. So, like, if we’d known that and insisted on being ‘kind’ to her anyway, that would’ve been shitty of us. But before we _did_ know that, it wasn’t, like, something we were able to know before she told us.”

She’s babbling now. Closing her eyes, she begins again. “Where I’m going with this is, just, I know we all try not to talk about, like, obviously horrifying topics to people without warning on a day-to-day basis, but if some normal or kind-seeming thing is bad for someone, it’s not your fault if you don’t know that beforehand. Brains are weird. It’s not your fault.”

“Thanks, Reno,” Tracy says softly. “It’s very kind of you to say that, and I do agree with you. But I do think I should’ve been a little quicker on the uptake that you didn’t want compliments of a certain nature, too.”

Jett fiddles with the wrench, turning it around and around in her hand in the darkness. “Thanks, Pollard,” she says finally. “But, again, I think you might be holding yourself to a _bit_ too high of a standard here. No one is the, the...the Decorated Fleet Admiral of Flawless Hyper-Perceptive Emotional Observative...ness...all the time, especially not twenty-four seven during a dangerous away mission, and you don’t have to be either, you know?” She gnaws her lip for a moment, smirking slightly as she adds, “I mean, you _are_ a doctor, not a counselor.”

Tracy laughs. “Point taken, Commander.” Voice slightly serious again, she adds, “Anyway, from this point forward, I’ll try not to bring anything of this nature up again. If you’d ever like to talk about it,” she adds quietly, “I’m here, but we don’t have to. You don’t have to.”

Jett feels something warm and weird swell in her chest at Tracy’s words, and she bites her lip, fiddling with the wrench again.

The wrench that she didn’t even damn well need.

All at once, she finds herself laughing quietly, her furious fight-or-flight reaction to the idea of actually _talking_ about her time on the Discovery suddenly feeling silly and needless in the face of Tracy’s calm words.

“No, it’s--I...don’t think I’d have a problem talking about it. Actually.” she says softly. _To you,_ she resists adding just in time. “It’s something I’ve--it’s approaching something I--have been wanting to talk about. With you.” As she says the words, she realizes that they’re true; that over the course of all their months of quiet lunchtime conversations, each of them have edged closer and closer to overt discussion of the chill that runs through the USS Discovery, the rust in the water main. “Especially after…” She hesitates, remembering Burnham’s empty seat in the mess hall and Keyla’s anguished whispers and Hugh’s thousand-yard stare and the hollows under Tracy’s eyes. “Especially after what happened last month.”

There is silence from outside the engine compartment. “But what I said earlier--” Jett continues, “I don’t need to bend your ear in the middle of a damn away mission, not when you have so many other things to keep an eye on as well.”

Tracy is quiet for another long few moments, and Jett has the sense that she knows the shape of what Jett has been wanting to say; has been edging toward it herself.

Which, Jett realizes abruptly, brings up the lingering question of whether they are also on the same page about a certain unrelated--or is it wholly unrelated?--aspect of their mealtime chats.

But, Jett decides, pushing the question from her mind, now is definitely not the time to be thinking about _that._

“You know,” Tracy says quietly, “until that medical check in a few minutes, I don’t have anything to do but pass you tools. Preferably,” she adds drily, “only when you actually you need them.”

Jett flushes in the darkness. “Right,” she mutters, flicking the soldering iron back on.

Concentrating on running the new line of solder, she gnaws her lip, trying to figure out where to begin.

“It’s--I mean, it’s close to the things we--the things we’ve more or less talked about before. The--the way things are, on the Discovery. The way all of Starfleet sometimes feels like it is, after the war.”

From outside the panel, Tracy makes a terse _mm-hmm_ noise, sounding tired. Jett plunges on.

“I know you, as a doctor--like, an actual-factual doctor and surgeon, not a stop-gap surgeon who bounced back into engineering like me--I know you see the...the worst of what this ship does to people. You and Hugh and the others patch up eternally brave people like Burnham and Georgiou and Rhys and Detmer and Owosekun and Airiam, and send them off to be sacrificed again, and--and it kills me to see what that does to you.” Jett swallows, thinking of Tracy moving through the Discovery like an automaton for a week after the most recent time that Burnham nearly died. And what kind of a sentence even _is_ that, ‘the _most recent_ time Burnham nearly died?’ “I wish I could make it--make it not be that way. For you,” she says hoarsely, then adds hastily, “For everyone on the ship.”

Jett can hear Tracy’s soft exhale of breath, but the other woman says nothing.

Giving up on the line of solder she is trying to run, Jett flicks the iron off again and lays back in the darkness, closing her eyes. “So I--when people--when everything’s like that and then on top of that people start--about what I fucking did--just, what I did, that’s all, and people are fucking _complimenting_ me--”

From outside the panel, Tracy makes a quiet querying sound, and Jett squeezes her eyes shut tight and gnaws furiously on her lip, trying to pull her words together again. The words are not the type of words that she says, that she explains aloud, and they seem to want to rise to her lips in chaos, or maybe something between chaos and uncertainty and shame. Who is _she_ to judge, after all? She _isn’t_ Burnham or Georgiou or Rhys or Detmer or Owosekun or Airiam. She isn’t one of the blissfully, categorically _good_ people. Who is _she_ to pass moral judgements on the rest of the people around her?

“I hate that people think it’s special. What I did.” She opens her eyes, staring into the darkness. “I--it’s not that I think anyone else _had_ to have done what I did, staying behind on a dying ship, almost no chance of survival, et cetera, et cetera. The opposite, if anything. It’s that--they compliment me, _and_ they get that all fucking backwards, too. They don’t even question the idea that I risked my own life—would’ve died, too, if it wasn’t for Burnham and her mom—which is not something you get to say every day about your first officer’s mother, but anyway—they don’t even question the idea that I risked my own life, because Starfleet is so damned good at indoctrinating people like Burnham to be all about laying down their own lives for the sake of others and indoctrinating everyone to expect that of them, no matter how small the chances of success. No. They don’t make a big deal about that. But the people who write to me…” She closes her eyes briefly. “And even our own damn crew on this godforsaken starship-turned-warship…they make a big ol’ fuckin’ deal about the fact that I…” She swallows. “That I _cared._ That I cared about ‘just’ half a dozen people who were categorically unlikely to survive.”

The words echo back at her in the dark crawlspace. Tracy is silent.

“They make a big fucking deal out of the fact I was ‘compassionate.’ _‘Compassionate,’_ ” Jett continues. “As though caring about your dying crewmates is some extra, angelic, special-enough thing that you—that you paste an _extra_ word onto someone who would do it, instead of being fucking _concerned_ about someone in Starfleet who _wouldn’t_.” She opens her eyes. “There was a time, when I first joined Starfleet, when—when not wanting the people around you to fucking die would’ve just been basic fucking decency. But now, I don’t know if it was this fucking war or the last fucking war or some-fucking-thing else or all of the above or what, but now just fucking _caring_ supposedly makes me _special_ and that—” _Scares the shit out of me._ “Pisses me the fuck off.”

There is another long moment of silence when Jett finishes, the anger and pain flooding through her after being shoved to the back of her mind for eight-odd months so loud in her ears that she doesn’t have room to be embarrassed about her useless emotional outburst yet. She can feel the embarrassment lurking, though, ready to pounce.

“Well, the hell of having an impromptu deep conversation on an away mission,” Tracy says apologetically, “is that, speaking of Starfleet decency, I need to go give our murderous pals a quick medical check before I can properly respond.”

Though Tracy sounds sheepish about having to make tracks directly after Jett poured her shriveled little heart out to her, Jett’s entire being floods with relief at the unexpected reprieve. “Take your time, Doc,” she manages. “I’ll wriggle my way outta here in case you need backup.”

“Thanks, Commander,” Tracy says gently. “Be back shortly.” Something tells Jett that she is in fact aware on some level of Jett’s post-rant embarrassment--which is currently beginning the slow process of settling onto Jett in full--given that her footsteps head away from the shuttle before Jett is out of the panel far enough that they would’ve had to make eye contact.

Sitting crosslegged on the shuttle deck and blinking in sudden light, Jett watches Tracy do her quick circuit of the stunned enemy forces, feeling like a gun-shy turtle as she shimmies herself back into the panel as Tracy returns.

“All good?” she asks, from the safety of her cavern.

“All good,” Tracy replies. “However 'good' can be defined in a situation like this, anyway.”

“Ha. Yeah.”

For another long moment there is silence.

“I had no idea people were talking about what you did like that,” Tracy says softly. “I had no idea, but—” She sighs, a quiet bitterness in her voice. “But I’m not surprised.”

“Yeah,” says Jett quietly.

“You and I…we’ve never truly talked about it, have we?” Tracy muses, almost to herself. “The things the war changed, or—the things the war laid bare, maybe.”

“Nah, but, I mean—” Jett stops; restarts. “I mean—we have, haven’t we, though, Doc? We’ve talked ‘round it enough by now that I know you’re fucking horrified by the, the…the way that things that should just _be, aren’t.”_ She closes her eyes, hearing the way her voice seems to come from some tired, scared place deep inside her. “The way ethics aren’t—the way they aren’t expected, not on our ship, not anymore, not towards everyone or all the time.”

“I see it,” Tracy says softly. “Every day. Usually small things. Sometimes very big ones.” Jett hears her take a rough breath, in and out. “The way people will look you right in the eye and tell you that what they’re doing is normal and okay even though just about everyone in the room silently knows that it…isn’t.”

“The way they act like it’s normal,” Jett echoes, a feeling like relief moving through her at Tracy’s words. “And the way that that—” She sighs. _The way that that terrifies us. The way that that confuses us. The way that that pisses us off._ “The way that makes us feel like everything’s just cataclysmically fucked.”

There is a moment of silence, then Tracy snorts quietly. “Cataclysmically, huh?”

Jett feels a wry half-smile spreading over her face. “Immensely, grotesquely, fuckeningly. Vocab word of your choice.”

Tracy laughs, a tired, scraping sound. “‘Fuckeningly’ sounds about right.” A touch of mischief creeps into tone as she adds, “Shakespearian, even.”

_“Pollard—!”_

Another laugh, quick and warm and closer, this time, to actual mirth. In the darkness of the panel, Jett smiles to herself. Residual fizzing, defensive energy from the fight with the settlers is still sparking through her, and the cold fear that the very crew they’re talking about might have been blown the hell up is still turning her stomach to knots, but in this moment, with Tracy telling her that the terrible coldness running through this ship staffed with the best of the best is categorically not something that Jett is making up, some portion of the back-of-the-mind tension that she has been carrying with her for months feels a little less tight.

From outside the panel, Jett can hear a quiet sigh and a rustle as though Tracy has shifted position or leaned back against the bulkhead. “And of course it—feels weird, right now, to criticize our crew, when they might be—” She breaks off.

“Yeah.”

“What a mess,” Tracy says, quietly, after a few more moments. “What a fucking mess.”

“What a fucking mess,” Jett echoes, flicking the soldering iron on again. “Our starship-turned-warship, putting their own crewmates in danger and now all in danger together while _we’re_ stuck down here bitching about Starfleet ethics and babysitting murderous salamanders.”

Tracy chuckles weakly, and there is another long silence as Jett reconnects the ripped-out ends of the wires.

“Getting ready this morning, I had no idea,” Tracy says, voice reflective, “that this away mission was going to go so haywire, or that the ship’s diplomatic mission would. And yet, here we are.”

“Oddly comforting, I suppose,” Jett murmurs, chasing another bead of solder around a corner, “that Murphy’s Law really is a constant.”

Tracy snorts again. “Depends on your definition of ‘comforting.’”

“Let’s call it the Shakespearian definition,” Jett says, and is rewarded once again by the surprised peal of Tracy’s laughter.

They sit in silence for another minute. “Never a week without a crisis on the USS Discovery,” Jett says, feeling her own voice trying to go wry, but not quite making it there. “Don’t know why we expected they _wouldn’t_ run into one while we left ‘em to their own devices while shuttling off down here.”

“Ha.”

“Yeah.” Jett sighs, trying not the think about the immensity of the warships that had circled Discovery like interstellar birds of prey.

“And now Hugh’s in command,” Tracy murmurs, “if casualties start to roll in.”

Jett frowns.

The words are nearly exactly the same words that Tracy uttered so many hours ago, glancing up into the violet sky, a cloud seeming to pass over her face as she said them. At the time, Jett had thought of Hugh and Tracy—friends, colleagues, and generally a duo, one half of which was recently back from the dead—and assumed that the painful emotion in Tracy's voice was fear for him.

Now, though, as Tracy’s words filter through to her in the dimness of the control panel as she concentrates on running another line of solder, Jett realizes that the emotion in Tracy’s voice doesn’t sound like that kind of worry at all. She sounds grim, and frustrated, and hurt.

“Pollard?” Jett ventures hesitantly, clicking off the soldering iron again.

“Yes?”

“Are...things, uh...okay?” Jett asks quietly. “Between you and Hugh?”

There is a very long silence.

“None of my fuckin’ business, truth be told,” Jett adds. “And then there’s the whole active-away-mission thing. You don’t have to tell me about your friendship shenanigans, assuming there even are any, is what I mean. But, just, I--”

“Hugh is one of my closest friends,” Tracy says, her soft voice cutting through Jett’s quiet rambling. “On the Discovery, or really anywhere. He’s wonderful to work with, and I admire him so much for being one of the first to reach out to Burnham and one of the first to stand up to Lorca, during the war. And I...I care about his and Paul’s relationship, and I do hope things work out for them.”

She pauses, and Jett waits, silent.

“But…”

Jett flicks the soldering iron on, popping a dangling chip off the panel with a fingernail and pressing it into a new position, the solder squishing satisfyingly under it as she listens.

“When we first shipped out on the Discovery,” Tracy begins quietly, “all I knew about Hugh’s partner in Engineering was that he was a conscripted civilian scientist and that he wasn’t happy to be here. I mean, I wasn’t about to fault him for that—none of us _wanted_ to be on a top-secret research ship in the middle of a war; well, aside from a few people I always tried to stay clear of, anyway. And then I actually met the guy.” Tracy chuckles. “At first, he seemed obnoxiously arrogant, like he thought his erudite cutting-edge research put him above us Starfleet drones. But I got to know him better, as Hugh and I settled into a working relationship, and—well, it isn’t as though he ever lost that arrogant edge entirely—”

“Yeah, you can say that again.”

Tracy snorts. “Ah, yes, I forget. You and he, bitter enemies ‘til the end.”

Jett snaps the penultimate box closed. “You’ve got that right.”

There’s a grin in Tracy’s voice, though it fades again after her first few words. “It wasn’t as though he ever lost that arrogant edge entirely, but I got to know him and like him a bit more as time went on. Still…on one hand, I started to get the sense that he genuinely didn’t _realize_ the negative impact his snappishness had on the people around him, or the small ways it exacerbated the tension that the war and Lorca and the Section 31 personnel injected into the ship. Not that not realizing wasn’t itself kind of thoughtlessness, but he certainly was no kindred spirit to Lorca; just a guy in over his head and not always handling it well. But on the other hand, I could see the way that stressed Hugh out, and…”

She trails off. “I don’t know how to…It felt like he and Hugh’s relationship was taking up mental real estate in sickbay—Hugh’s; the rest of ours—and, yes, it was easy to feel some frustration about that. But I didn’t dislike the guy, and at the end of the day, I was glad for he and Hugh had each other.” A sigh. “And then came the tardigrade disaster.”

She is quiet for a moment, and Jett remembers that Discovery lost its then-Chief of Security in that incident. She chews her lip, staring up into the darkness.

When Tracy begins again, though, there’s a smile in her voice. “Paul Stamets, injecting himself with tardigrade DNA and piloting a ship through the mycelial network and all the, erm, personality changes that came with that…well, it was quite something. And then—” The amused note in her voice fades. “Well, you know the rest. Lorca manipulating Paul, who’d already had his arm twisted to join Starfleet, and him ending up in a coma. And then, losing Hugh…” Tracy is quiet for another moment. “Paul and I got closer after that. In the months between losing Hugh and his return, he got closer with most of Hugh’s colleagues, especially me and Jake and Mahmoud. Philippa, too, when she was rescued at the end of the war and hit it off with Jake while helping him train the security medics. And ever since Hugh came back to us, we’ve all stayed close, so—you’d think it’d be good, right? Friendship, positive working relationships, all that good starship stuff?” Tracy sighs. “But then, of course, it _had_ to get all fucked up and—I know I shouldn’t hold it against Hugh _or_ Paul, but sometimes I just…” She breaks off with a short sigh.

Jett can hear the hurt that is barely disguised by the angry edge in her tone, and she scowls, preparing to get angry with those two gremlins herself for whatever they’ve done to upset Tracy, even as uneasy confusion dogs at her. In the six months that she herself has spent on the Discovery, she has learned to mentally file Tracy, Hugh, Paul, Georgiou, Jake, and Mahmoud as a sort of loose social unit, spending off-duty time together and seen eating lunch together as often as not. All six drift in and out of their lunch table—Tracy to eat with Jett; Jake to comm his kids on Earth or catch a game with his sports buddies on the holo-TV in Discovery’s tiny rec room—and sometimes more junior sickbay staff will join them or Íris, Discovery’s research-focused CMO, will wander over from their science department friends to sit with colleagues in their actual department; for all its faults, the USS Discovery doesn’t exactly have lunch table cliques.

But, when it comes to the daily social life of the ship, Jett is accustomed to thinking of Tracy, Hugh and Paul, and the others as a sort of...unit. A known factor. A package deal. Hearing that Tracy is having issues with Hugh and Paul, of all people, feels...disorienting, as though a room in Discovery that Jett has walked by every day has suddenly been repurposed into a weapons storage locker or a nuclear physics lab or a bungee jumping facility and she is suddenly having to reroute her internal schematics of the ship to account for the sudden change. Or, no. It feel as though someone has opened the door to that familiar room, and Jett has discovered that it was actually a nuclear physics bungee storage locker for months, and it was Jett who hadn’t known about it.

“Hey,” she says, trying to inject gentleness into her own tone as she peers at the busted wiring in front of her. “You’re allowed to have messy, crappy feelings and shit, yeah? Like…feelings aren’t good or bad it’s what you do with them and blah blah blah,” she echoes from her vague memory of the mental health self-help materials Starfleet Counselling periodically sends around, and Tracy chuckles in recognition. “For serious, though.” Jett continues. “Nothing wrong with feeling things about fucked-up shit, even not-so-nice things, so long as you don’t act like a complete asshole, which you of all people sure won’t.”

She can hear a tired smile in Tracy’s voice. “Thanks, Reno.”

Jett smiles to herself as she pokes a wire aside with the needlenose pliers. “What… _did_ happen?” she asks simply.

“It was…” Tracy hesitates. “A lot of things, really, but everything just got so fucked up with what happened last month.”

Coldness hits the pit of Jett’s stomach, and she lays the pliers down. “Oh,” she contributes, brilliantly. “Yeah. That fucked a lot of things up, didn’t it?”

“What do you know?” Tracy asks quietly. “About what happened?”

Jett sighs, staring up into the darkness as she lets herself drift back to that shitty, shitty week. “Well, from what I heard and what I saw of her myself, Burnham was pretty fucked up from all the family stuff and Saru stuff and other stuff she’d been put through, and Georgiou and Tyler and supposedly Saru were trying to look out for her, but then that week Georgiou was on Earth trying to track down a lead on the whole sketchy Control/Section 31 thing and Tyler was off being a part of the whole sketchy Control/Section 31 thing, and then--I never did hear any of the particulars, but from what I heard, someone figured out that the mission in the Pome system could be accomplished slowly but in a low-risk way or quickly but in a super-high-risk-of-getting-dead way, and they needed someone who was good with languages and also tech, so Burnham volunteered to do it the super-high-risk-of-getting-dead way, and Pike and Saru were like, “Okay, sounds fine,” and surprise-surprise Burnham got beamed back in critical condition, and Georgiou came back to the ship from Earth, and according to Keyla who heard it from Gen who heard it from an ensign who was defragging old PADDs in the office next to Pike’s ready room when she came to find him, she was like, “Asshole you let my old first officer get mostly-dead, I’m gonna kick your ass into the Gamma Quadrant,” and he was all, “Nooo you can’t kick my ass into the Gamma Quadrant, you and I got both got ourselves shot and stabbed mostly-dead in the last year and a half alone and it’s Burnham’s Starfleet-given right to get herself mostly-dead too if necessary,” and she was like, “First of all doing this dumbass mission quickly wasn’t necessary, and second of all relative power and psychological trauma and inability to consent, let me draw you a picture of them,” and he was like, “But Burnham can make her own decisions and she’s such a good officer and a strong person and what about her agency ahaha,” and Georgiou was like, “I’ll show you agency when my fist uses its agency to smash into your face.” Though probably not in those exact words,” Jett amends. “The one thing everyone agrees on is that they…how did Keyla put it…‘had words.’” She sighs, a long exhale upward into the cramped darkness. “Loudly. And then Georgiou tried to get him court-martialled but the admiralty didn’t go for it and I guess he and she patched things up enough to have what I gotta assume is the world’s most awkward working relationship and Burnham recovered enough to go back on light duty and no one ever spoke of it again.”

There is a moment of silence, and then a sound like a shaken cat that sounds as though Tracy is trying to suppress half-hysterical laughter. “Y--yes,” she manages, wrestling her voice steady a moment later. “That--would be a fairly good summary of the major points of the incident.” Taking another breath, she continues, her voice growing quieter, “But--well, I don’t know how much you know about chain of command and medical authority on a starship? Everyone knows an individual physician has authority even over the captain when it comes to anything defined as a medical decision, including relieving a crew member of duty. And I know you know,” she continues, “that Íris relieved Burnham of duty for two days after Saru asked her to kill him a few months ago. Which, of course, I wouldn’t be able to mention it now, for Burnham’s medical privacy,” she adds, “but I know she complained to you about it when Íris told her she couldn’t even go back on duty to help you with something as boring as those relays.” There’s a wry smile in her voice again that falls away as she says, “And now I’m rambling, but all of that’s—relevant, I guess you could say. See—”

Another few seconds pass in near-silence; Jett hears Tracy take a breath and let it out again, as though trying to think where to begin. “What _have_ I told you about how the medical team…addressed the situation?”

Jett hesitates. “You mentioned something about Klaudija. How you and she had had a disagreement about how to handle something about the situation, but you’d come out of it respecting her for having clearly-defined principles and sticking by them. Or something?” She hesitates. “I assumed that since you were talking about Burnham’s care after she was…you know, injured…you had to keep it vague for medical privacy reasons. Anyway, it seemed like you didn’t want to go into it.”

Tracy is quiet for another minute. “You’re right that I…wasn’t ready to go into it, I guess,” she says at last. “But—well, that…that _wasn’t_ what I was talking about, actually. It wasn’t Burnham’s care after she was injured we had the disagreement about; it was what was going on before she left.”

Jett feels a furrow tug at her eyebrows. “Before?”

“See, we—” Tracy stops and starts again. “You mentioned it yourself; how Burnham wasn’t doing so well, given everything going on with her family, not to mention the Saru incident. I was the one in command of sickbay, then,” she adds, some painful emotion now audible in her low voice, “when she and Saru came in afterwards, but was Íris who spotted that Burnham was trembling and tugged the story out of her. I had just been so relieved that Saru was going to make it that I didn’t think to check on Burnham properly.” It’s regret, Jett realizes, that she can hear in Tracy’s voice, though Tracy adds, “Then again, _‘Commander Burnham, a few minutes ago, did Commander Saru ask you to kill him as he lay dying, and did you accept his request out of shock and affection, and begin lifting the knife to do so, only for the part of his body that he’d asked you to cut off to suddenly fall off before you touched it?’_ isn’t exactly an obvious screening question.”

“Yeah, not exactly.”

Tracy sighs. “Anyway, Burnham was obviously not fit to go back on duty, and Íris caught that and relieved her of duty for two days. Tyler was on the ship at that point, and he stepped in to help her get some actual rest and talk about what happened. Íris cleared her for duty again when the two days were up, given that she wasn’t showing any signs of distress and she’d passed their psych screening.”

Tracy hesitates again. “Over the course of the next month, though, there were some…concerning reports about the way people in her life were acting toward her. There was gossip from the ensigns in the quarters next to hers and Tilly’s that her brother had loudly destroyed something of hers, and then there was Pike keeping her on full schedule even all she’d been through. Hugh voiced some concerns to him, but he just said he ‘trusted Burnham to make decisions about her own wellbeing,’ as though to imply that Hugh didn’t,” Tracy says, a stab of frustration audible in her voice. “Then, a month after the Saru incident, sickbay got the news at twenty-one-hundred hours that the next morning she was set to go on an away mission with an incredibly high risk of life-threatening injury. Jake was on duty, and he immediately called her to sickbay to check on her and do a psych screen. I think he was expecting that he’d be able to relieve her of duty then and there. But the thing is—”

There’s a painful rawness in Tracy’s voice, now. Jett listens in silence, fiddling with the rag in her pocket.

“She passed the screen,” Tracy explains, “and showed only mild signs of distress; nothing abnormal for a Starfleet officer in a stressful situation. And of course, within Starfleet, being willing to assume an incredibly high risk of life-threatening injury isn’t in and of itself considered grounds for relieving someone of duty or we’d relieving people of duty constantly. So, Jake couldn’t _use_ his individual medical authority to circumvent the chain of command. There just wasn’t anything to justifiably trigger it.”

Tracy pauses, and there is a rustle as though she’s shifting position again. “He called an emergency meeting. Four hours in the sickbay conference room in the middle of gamma shift.” Jett can hear her lips quirk in a slight smile. “Klaudija and Ivy were both wearing their uniform jackets over their pajamas.”

Jett snorts in spite of herself.

“We were trying to figure out what to do. We were all in agreement in our concerns about how Burnham was being treated by the crew and what they’d asked her to do. The argument was over the ethics of potential mechanisms of intervention. The thing was, the main problem _wasn’t_ Burnham’s individual mental state; it was the way the people around her were treating her, from Cornwell to Saru.”

Jett can hear the rawness again in Tracy’s tone. “The danger she was in was because of her condition _combined_ with the way the people on the ship were treating her. And that—well. There wasn’t Starfleet medical division protocol for intervening in a situation like that. For us, relieving someone of duty is individual; it’s reserved for keeping someone safe from to the mental or physical state that they themselves are in, not protecting them from the people around them. There was nothing any of us could do under our own medical authority, not without entering a false diagnosis into Burnham’s permanent medical records, and that’s—well, that wasn’t a thing we were about to do.”

She sighs again. “When it came to the main chain of command, outside of that unusable medical authority, the only authority we had lay in our respective ranks, like anyone else on the ship. Nothing that would be binding on a captain, or an admiral. If we were going to conclusively stop the mission, we’d need to find a way to trigger our Starfleet medical authority. And deciding that we were relieving an individual of duty based on the actions of those around them—rewriting the rulebook, basically—wasn’t something any of us could just order the others to go along with.”

 _Speaking of secret bungee labs._ Jett frowns, listening intently; she never would have guessed that all of this was going on in sickbay hours before Burnham’s mission.

“So we talked it out, or tried to. Íris, as CMO, could’ve just listened to us and then decided themselves, but they were on gamma shift command in sickbay, and while they popped in a few times to keep in touch with the deliberations, they did largely have be present in sickbay; command isn’t exactly an on-call situation--” Tracy sighs again, cutting herself off. “Anyway, they didn’t want to make an executive decision since they hadn’t been there for deliberations, and they hadn’t switched shifts with one of us to be there for deliberations since they didn’t have significant experience with either psychological trauma or this type of ethical issue. Or, for that matter, with Discovery’s main command structure itself, lab nerd that they are.”

Jett makes a noise of acknowledgment. It’s widely known that Íris, selected for the Discovery due to their research qualifications back when the newly-commissioned ship was intended to be more science vessel than warship, leaves much of the command of sickbay to Hugh and Tracy.

“It ended with me, Jake and Ivy arguing to extend our ability to relieve Burnham of duty and Hugh, Klaudija and Mahmoud arguing against. So, at that point, it defaulted back to the command structure. Hugh’s 2IC trumped my 3IC.” Tracy laughs mirthlessly. “Sounds like that old battleship game.”

Jett makes a noise of acknowledgement before shutting the final control box. “All set in here, Doc,” she says quietly. “On to the next bulkhead.”

A note of surprised happiness enters Tracy’s voice, as though Jett’s words have pulled her back to the present situation and this small success. _“Nice_ going, Reno.”

Jett smiles as she shimmies her way out of the small space. “Thanks, Doc,” she says, blinking in the brighter light, and Tracy smiles at her. It’s odd to abruptly actually visually see her again after so many minutes of hearing her as a disembodied voice. The expression in her eyes is tired but happy as she meets Jett’s eyes, one elbow resting on one propped-up knee, uniform still muddy from the fight.

Jett smiles back at her again as she pops open the adjoining section of bulkhead, repositioning the vent fan before levering herself into the small space with her tools.

“Fan on?” Tracy asks as Jett shimmies herself deeper into the space.

“Fan on,” Jett confirms.

They keep each other company in silence for the next few minutes as Jett diagnoses the panels of the busted control boxes in this new section of bulkhead, muttering to herself. Finally she flicks the soldering iron on again, gnawing her lip for a minute before asking, hesitantly, “So, uh…why? Did they came down against it, I mean?”

Tracy sighs softly. “Klaudija being disabled means that even in this day and age she’s had to fight to be seen as someone with the agency and right to make her own decisions about her own medical care and her own life. For her, her choice came from a perspective of not wanting to take away Michael’s agency.”

“So, like Pike, but less obnoxiously?” Jett mutters.

Tracy either doesn’t hear her, or pretends that she doesn’t. “Mahmoud felt similarly; he agreed the mission was ill-advised but thought that Burnham passing the psych screen meant that if we stepped in and made her decision for her, we were worse than the people who may or may not have been pressuring her to _go_ on the away mission, and that it would imply negative things about Burnham if we intervened on her behalf and implied she couldn’t stand up to pressures around her herself if necessary.”

“I see.” Jett stares at the new tangle of jumbled, half-melted wiring in front of her. “I guess.”

Tracy makes a sound that could be a laugh or a sigh. “And on the other side of things—well, if you want my interpretation, Jake is a father of teenagers; even though he’s barely more than a decade older than Michael, I thinks he fundamentally saw her as a kid in need of protection. His stated argument was that we’d all trained to make judgement calls to protect the wellbeing of those around us, even if it went against what our CO’s said, and that this was one of those times, and he agreed with me that Spock and Pike and Cornwell and Saru’s behavior toward Burnham could be conclusively argued to have crossed a line. And quoth Ivy—” A real laugh comes into Tracy’s voice now, even if it is still tinged with exhaustion. “‘If I let Burnham get killed on an away mission, Georgiou’ll never speak to me again, and I need that woman at my side Monday morning to help juggle the new training schedules. Medics may not _always_ stick together, but we don’t let our CO’s get away with bullshit, either.’”

Jett laughs aloud. “I can see why she and Georgiou get along.”

Tracy snorts. “No kidding.”

There is silence of a moment, and Jett concentrates on running a line of solder, feeling her tongue poke its way out of the side of her mouth in concentration.

“You know how, at the Academy, they stress that one of the most important things to know about someone is how they treat others and make decisions during a crisis?” Tracy asks. “This was after my time,” she adds, “but according to the younger ensigns, they’re doing a test simulation about it now, called the ‘Kobayashi Maru’ after a real ship that went down a while back. The whole point of it is, there’s no way to win the simulation and you’re assessed on how you act and the choices you make when everything’s going to shit.”

Jett makes an intrigued noise, and Tracy is silent for another few moments. “I guess you could say that, as wrong as I think the others were to make the choices that they did, the whole…incident…at least affirmed that in a crisis, Klaudija and Jake and Mahmoud and Ivy will make decisions grounded in specific logical and ethical frameworks. Even if one of those frameworks is a strong stance against CO bullshit,” she adds with a chuckle before her voice grows serious again. “And that…well, that’s something I want in my colleagues. Very much so.”

Jett hesitates for a moment, then admits quietly, “I might be a little more, uh, results-over-process on this one, myself.” She is, she realizes, still grappling with the newfound knowledge that the medical team had it almost within their grasp to _do something,_ and didn’t. “I get ya. But…” She sighs and makes a noncommittal noise.

“Well, Reno,” Tracy says, very softly, “I _do_ like you for a reason.”

Jett chases another escaping bead of solder around a corner, letting the mess of emotions settle over her: affection for Tracy, and all her newfound varying feelings about the actions of the rest of Discovery’s medical-division decision-makers.

Tracy is quiet for another moment before she continues. “Well, you _know_ Hugh and Klaudija and Mahmoud, so I probably don’t have to tell you what happened after…after. All of them were horrified by what their decision helped make possible. And you know the rest of us, too, so I probably don’t have to tell you that even with all the initial anger and stress in the air in the days after Burnham’s surgery, everyone was quick to assure them that they don’t have sole responsibility for what happened.” There is a quiet _click_ of metal against deck, as though Tracy is absently fiddling with one of Jett’s spare tools. “I mean, after all, the problem itself was that we _were_ all part of a chain, and that sometimes it’s hard to tell when to go all-out to grind that chain to a halt. Especially since doing so often will have other undesirable consequences as well, as with Klaudija’s concern about Michael’s agency.”

“Shit,” Jett offers, after a brief pause.

Tracy laughs slightly. “Indeed.”

Both of them are silent for another moment, Jett closing her eyes briefly before gazing back up into the dimness of the shuttle guts above her.

“Mahmoud has only been a practicing physician for a few years, and he’s an incredibly conscientious one; I know that he made his decision from a place of wanting to apply standard medical ethical principles in a way that was compassionate and fair to Burnham. And Klaudija and I…well. We’re okay. More than okay, really,” Tracy continues. “She said that while in hindsight she now feels that she shouldn’t have chosen exactly as she did in this particular situation, she knows that in a similar future situation she’d probably do the same. So now she’s currently trying to figure out what it all means to her going forward--how she can operate ethically within a command structure on a starship that makes that nearly unworkable at times.” There is a sad smile in Tracy’s voice. “Like I said, she and I have had some good conversations, and we’re good, you know?”

Jett makes an acknowledging noise, even though, she realizes, she’s not sure if she does know. Tracy, like several of Jett’s friends and colleagues on the Discovery, from her closest friend Engineering, Tuya, to Gen on the bridge, to Mahmoud and Jake and Georgiou in the sickbay bunch, has a way of thinking about things that…

Jett sighs, frowning to herself. A way of thinking about things that doesn’t stop Jett from liking them or admiring them— _or falling in love with them, apparently,_ her subconscious reminds her merrily—but a way that Jett isn’t sure she understands or is necessarily particularly thrilled to be around. It’s a hard quality to describe, and she struggles to put it into words, even to herself, without the description sounding like an insult; even ‘directness,’ the closest she’s gotten, feels like a euphemism for ‘unquestioning’ or ‘incapable of nuance,’ and Tracy in particular is anything but.

 _Temporal linearity,_ Jett reflects as she stares at the final control box in this section. The ability to figure something out and then move on to the next thing, which…sounds like a good thing, she has to admit, and probably _is_ preferable much of the time to Jett’s messy combination of on-duty confidence and private grumpy, avoidant overthinking loops. Still. If someone in Jett’s department had done something morally shitty, Jett wouldn’t have just listened to it, decide to respect it, and then moved on and assumed others were doing the same, and maybe in some ways that linearity is a good quality to have if you’re a first responder on a crisis-prone starship but maybe in some ways it isn’t.

“And I take it,” she says aloud, lifting the screwdriver again and beginning to untwist the minute screws in the control panel, “that you and Hugh, uh...did not have those good conversations?”

There is silence for a long moment.

“Hugh. Hugh...well.” Tracy sighs. “Here’s the thing. Out of every one of us in medical division, he’s been closest to Burnham, practically since she came on board and he started worrying about her as they navigated Lorca and the tardigrade and, well, everything. So to say that he feels like shit about what happened to her last month is an understatement. And I think that, even more than Klaudija and Mahmoud, he regrets the decision he made that night. But--well, this is where I can’t figure out how to tell it to you with any pretense of objectivity, Reno, so you’ll just have to hear my side of things and work out the other side if you feel like doing so.”

Jett digs the screwdriver into the box door, popping it open and swinging it out to press it flush against the wall. “Figure I can do that, Pollard,” she says, trying to keep her voice gentle despite the various tensions that continue to gnaw on her as she stares at another half-melted jumble. The welcome distraction, even painful distraction, offered by Tracy’s voice provides something to remind her of the passage of time during the hot, sticky repair work, but the tight, jangly energy from she and Tracy’s own fight is still rumbling through her as she works, and the combination of that restlessness and her tamped-down fear for their ship makes her whole body feel like a fritzing electrical system, fretting and sparking.

There is another long silence, as though Tracy is steeling herself to come out from under the awning of attempted objectivity. “To me,” she says simply, “Klaudija and Mahmoud did the wrong thing for the right reasons. They had their principles, they explained the ethical frameworks they were operating under, and they listened to the opposing viewpoint but then ended up sticking to those principles. But Hugh--” Tracy’s voice breaks off for a long moment. “ _Of course_ Hugh has principles. You’ve heard me talk about how much I relied on him, during the war; how he found the courage and clarity of observation--before any of the rest of us, really--to stand up to Lorca. He was looking into the process of filing an official complaint with the admiralty when he--when we lost him.” Tracy’s voice goes thick for a moment, but when she speaks again, the threatening tears have been banished. “I always looked to him as someone I could trust to make decisions rooted in his principles.” Her voice goes soft. “Kind of like how I rely on you.”

In the darkness, Jett feels her face flush.

 _Not now,_ she tells it silently.

“But this time--this time, when he argued for letting Burnham ‘make her own decisions,’ right after he’d spent the evening talking to Paul about it--I felt like he and Paul were...projecting themselves into the situation, basically. Making it…” She hesitates, as though searching for the right words. “Making _Burnham’s_ situation personal to _them_ in a way that it shouldn’t have been.”

“Oh,” Jett says, feeling her brow furrow as she squishes the end of a wire back against its broken connection. “How?”

Tracy hesitates for a moment. “Well, on a basic level, Paul has always been the hell out of the loop when it comes to Starfleet’s command structure. As a recent addition to Starfleet, he doesn’t have it all…internalized, you know? For him, chain of command is just silly bureaucracy outside his purview. So I feel like, when he and Hugh talked about our upcoming meeting, it—our meeting—would’ve all felt like it was…outside of the ‘real’ situation to Paul, while to him, Burnham and Pike and Cornwell were the ones who _were_ inside the ‘real’ situation of actually making decisions about the mission.”

She sighs again. “That’s sort of tangential, though; just a suspicion I have, and maybe an uncharitable one. The thing that really frustrates me about how he and Hugh and their relationship impacted this—I just feel they made it _personal_ rather than rooted in a solid framework. Paul had his arm twisted to join Starfleet, and he was horribly manipulated by Lorca, and it isn’t that I don’t sympathize with him, but it felt like he and Hugh were looking at Burnham and partially seeing, you know, their own situation; a woman who knew what she wanted to do and Starfleet bureaucracy, in the form of us, interfering in her life. And I feel like if Hugh and Paul’s relationship hadn’t been so much a part of Hugh’s life, taking up all that mental real estate from all of us, then just maybe he would’ve more easily seen the opposite analogy; the way what was being done to Burnham wasn’t actually just her making a brave choice but was a lot more along the lines of the way people were disregarded and used by Lorca. Except that this time,” she adds, “it _wasn’t_ a captain from a mirror universe who was doing it, it was Pike and Spock and all of us, and—”

She breaks off, sighing. “It _was_ all of us, and it’s unfair for me to blame Hugh and Paul’s relationship on Hugh’s questionable decision-making that night, I know, but—well, that’s my story, Reno, in what I guess we can call all of its ‘fuckeningly’ messy complication. Ever since that meeting, I haven’t felt like I could rely on Hugh’s on-duty decision-making in quite the same way. I still trust him as a physician and as a friend, just—” She laughs unhappily. “It’s hard. To untangle everything that happened.”

Jett snaps the repaired control box gently shut, thinking of the coldness that runs through the Discovery, and all the strange months she has spent on the ship, acclimating to that. Wondering if she _should_ be acclimating to that. “Yeah.”

“And for Hugh’s part,” Tracy continues, “I think he’s a bit…frustrated with me, I guess, because I told him eventually that I didn’t like the way he made his decision, and I think he feels like I’m giving Jake a pass because he agreed with me, even if we all know he was thinking about his kids and his reasons weren’t that much less personal or logically-founded than I felt like Hugh’s were. And, well…I suspect the same thing of myself, that I _am_ going easier on Jake for doing the same thing that I’m so irked with Hugh for doing; deciding in part based on personal family stuff rather than a specified ethical framework.” She sighs again. “So that’s another reason he and I are still…at odds about it.”

Jett is silent for several seconds, teasing apart half-melted wires. “This control box is in a worse state than the others,” she says aloud. “I’ll probably need a food break before I’m done with it.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Jett squints at the wires again, sighing. “What a mess, huh?” They both know she’s no longer referring to the box. “What a fucking mess.”

“You can say that again.”

Jett snorts, then grow serious again. “I’ve been…wondering about it all,” she continues. “Ever since I came onboard. There’s that…those bits of wrongness in the fabric of the ship, that coldness and lack of, yaknow, I don’t know, willingness to care. And stuff. And I don’t know where it came from, you know? The war, or that janky parallel universe you all got tossed into, or maybe something about—” She hesitates; she’s never voiced this theory of hers aloud. “About the…you know…personal qualifications of the people Starfleet saw fit to assign to their top-secret wartime research vessel.” It’s a relief, she realizes, with surprise, to finally say so. “Probably there isn’t just one answer, you know? And then, along with all that, or as part of it, there’s that…the way people treat Burnham. Why is there that…that compassion-fatigue-ish weirdness, but toward _her_ specifically?” She swallows, setting down the soldering iron again. Maybe she does need a lunch break; she suddenly doesn’t feel confident that she can give the necessary focus to the wires. “Why did—” Her voice cracks unexpectedly. “Why did they decide to say it was okay for her to probably die?”

There is a long silence.

“Well…I think there’s a chance some part of it is about the mutiny, still,” Tracy offers, sounding dubious. “I mean, yes, the bridge crew stood with her against Cornwell, in the end, but the whole rest of the crew…the admiralty presented Burnham as a villain, and I suppose some of us still subconsciously see her that way, as someone who needed and needs to be redeemed, instead of someone scapegoated after making a questionable decision in pain during a messy crisis and who never deserved to have a war blamed on her at all. That was something that Ivy pointed out, that night,” she adds. “That some people still think of her as someone it’s more fair to endanger, not that anyone onboard would likely admit it.”

Jett gnaws on her lip. “Yeah.” She hesitates. “And maybe on Pike’s part—he has that whole _thing_ about having missed the war, you know? And then there’s Cornwell.” She laughs sarcastically. “Burnham was the one who was _here_ , making both questionable and good decisions, while Pike was on the sidelines and Cornwell tried to destroy a planet. I mean, I doubt there’s a one-to-one relationship between that and them being willing to endanger her, but there’s plenty of…weird history going on amid all concerned, that’s for sure. Not that either of them’d ever own up to that weirdness being part of their decision, and not that that explains other people in the crew going along with it.”

“That’s true.” Tracy is silent for a few seconds. “And speaking of things that go very much unspoken, of course suggesting that racism might have been a factor would only lead to an endless relitigation of whether racism could _possibly_ still exist in 23rd-century Starfleet.”

Jett gnaws her lip, trying to figure out how to respond. While she’s aware that racism does still exist in Starfleet, 23rd century or no 23rd century, it obviously isn’t something she’s ever had to deal with herself, nor has she ever observed what has happened when someone has brought it up.

“I didn’t know that that was what happened,” she says quietly. “If you brought it up.”

“Yes,” Tracy says, “that’s usually how it goes.”

 _Usually._ It occurs to Jett, for the first time, to wonder whether some of the coldness and somewhat suggestively _varying_ application of ethical principles that she has noticed on the Discovery has been present all along, on the other starships she has served on as well, and the additional fucked-up-edness of the war, along with her proximity to Burnham, has simply made it more noticeable to her on the Discovery.

Aloud, she says, “I guess in the time you’ve been on the Discovery, you’ve…seen how a lot of people have…acted towards her? As a specialist and a first officer and all?”

Tracy makes a sound of acknowledgement. “I have. And…”

She hesitates, as though unsure whether to continue. Jett makes a soft querying noise.

“I can’t imagine,” Tracy says quietly, “if Tilly offered to sacrifice her life, just to get an important mission done slightly faster, and Pike and Cornwell signed off on that, and everyone else agreed to it with hardly a murmur. I can’t imagine that happening, and I can’t imagine everyone acting like it was just another mission gone wrong when she was beamed back in critical condition.”

They are both silent for several moments.

“I can’t imagine it,” Tracy says, her voice quiet and blank. “I mean, I can’t even make the pictures come up in my head. _I can’t imagine it.”_

There is another long pause. Jett closes her eyes, realizing, as she tries to imagine Tilly in Burnham’s place, that she can’t imagine it, either.

“I don’t have your perspective on it,” she finally says, “not being a person of color and all, but I’ve noticed so many…differences, in how people act towards her, ever since I hitched a ride off that asteroid.” She closes her eyes again, thinking back. “The way everyone acts toward her during crises, as opposed to Tilly or Saru when bad stuff has happened to them. Like they just…think her strength is infinite. And even—and that’s not the worst of it, is it? If they really, truly just _did_ think that her strength was infinite—I mean, not that that’s not _shit_ , but if that was, you know, _it,_ then they would’ve had, you know, an ‘Oh, shit’ moment when she nearly died, wouldn’t they? But they didn’t.”

Tracy’s voice is tight with pain. “I’ve never…in my years in Starfleet, I’ve never seen a captain and an admiral treat the near-death of a fellow commanding officer like that. For Pike and Cornwell and some of the crew, it felt like their reaction was just… ‘Oh, yes, unfortunate, shit happens, we’re glad she’ll make a mostly-complete recovery soon.’ No ‘My god, what have we done?’”

Jett realizes that she’s squeezing the soldering iron’s grip so hard its base is leaving indents in her palm. She slowly relaxes her hand, letting a long breath out.

“They don’t value her in the same way,” Tracy says quietly. “I think that they don’t.”

Jett sighs. “Well, that’s—fucked.”

“That was something we talked about in medical school, as well,” Tracy adds. “There’s a long and well-documented history of women of color being seen to have less value.” She sighs softly. “Not that it wouldn’t be just as real, too, if it was officially documented less.”

Jett gnaws her lip again, trying to think what to say. “I’m sorry you’re having to deal with all this shit on top of, you know, the aftermath of a quadrant-wide war and everything.”

“Ha. Yes. That war didn’t help anything, did it?”

“Could’ve done without it, myself,” Jett agrees, and smiles at the sound of Tracy’s tired laugh.

“I don’t know exactly what my next steps are,” Tracy says simply. “After all that’s happened. It’s such a cliché but—they really _don’t_ teach you about times like this at the Academy, huh?”

“No,” Jett agrees, “they sure don’t.”

She fiddles with the rag in her pocket again, trying to think what else to say, when the communicator on her belt squawks suddenly with interference, and then the staticky voice of the woman they’ve been discussing calls, “Burnham to away team. Away team, do you read me?”

Jett startles in surprise before wriggling back out of the crawlspace. Blinking in the sudden light, she grabs the communicator and flips it fully open, warm relief spreading in her chest like a newborn star as she and Tracy beam at each other, the background fear held taught between them melting away for the first time in hours. “We read ya, Commander.”

“What is your status, away team?”

“Pollard and I are alive and uninjured; our shuttle is intact but grounded. We’re safe for the time being, but we’ve fended off two attacks by the settlers that weren’t _supposed_ to be in this hemisphere, with nine tied up and no idea when more could pop up on long-ranger sensors.” It isn’t protocol, but she can’t resist asking, a knot of fear still twisting inside her, “What’s your status, Discovery?”

“No combat, no injuries. Diplomatic channels were successfully used to avert conflict.”

Jett and Tracy grin at each other, and Jett could just about wrap herself in the look of hope and relief that sparkles in Tracy’s eyes. “Nice goin’, Discovery. Any chance of a ride?”

“We can do you one better, Commander,” Burnham says, and Jett can hear a note of delighted pride in her voice. It feels just slightly awkward to suddenly be chatting with the woman whose situation she and Tracy were just discussing in such depth, but familiar protocol and formality of the ship-to-away-team check-in keeps it from feeling too weird. “Tilly, Ramirez and Owosekun figured out how to get the transporters to work despite the atmospheric interference, so we’ll be beaming you up and another crew down to repair the shuttle and make sure the prisoners have everything they need until the shuttle is repaired and we’re ready to release them. Are any of them injured?”

“Hey, nice going, Discovery,” Jett says, grinning, as she reaches back into the bulkhead to switch off the vent fan and levers herself to her feet, following Tracy as they make their way out of the shuttle. “All the hostiles are unconscious but uninjured; the doc already checked ‘em out. One of ‘em took two stun blasts, but the doc says she doesn’t seem to be worse off than the others. The miracles of Federation technology, huh?”

“I’m glad Dr. Pollard is there to check them out,” Burnham responds earnestly. “It’s always terrifying, using phasers on non-Federation species. I’ve never had an incident where someone I stunned reacted badly, but it’s haunting to know it can always happen.”

Jett nods, though Burnham can’t see it, blinking in the even brighter light of the clearing. “Ended well today, so we’ll just thank our lucky stars and hope it ends well next time as well.” She surveys the unconscious figures. Assholes, all of them. But better alive assholes than dead assholes, even so.

“Anything else we should know about your status or situation, away team?” Burnham asks crisply.

Jett glances at Tracy, who shakes her head. “Doc and I both say negative, Commander.”

“Understood, away team,” Burnham responds, and there is a minute of silence, the open comm line hissing away quietly to itself. Jett finds herself grinning at Tracy in the easy quiet, the safety of their ship and crew sinking in and the frozen fear that has haunted the back of Jett’s mind for the past few hours since Discovery’s final communication finally melting away, and Tracy smiles back.

“So, you’re both doing all right?” Burnham’s voice crackles from the communicator again, tone now a bit more conversational. She must have delivered their status report to the relevant parties, and wants to keep them on the line until beamout.

“A bit rattled, what with being two defenseless non-security-officers and all,” Jett replies sweetly, then adds more seriously, “Nah, we’re fine. Pollard fixed my concussion and squashed-up hand and we regenerated each other’s more obvious ouchies, and nothing particularly awful happened. Just a good old-fashioned firefight-turned-rumble.” The image of a knife flashing toward her in the lavender sunlight ghosts across her mind, and she gets to her feet, shifting her weight back and forth to offset the jangly tension reverberating through her body now that the danger is past. “It was a bit of a close one,” she allows, after a moment, “but nothing particularly awful happened.”

“I’m glad,” Burnham says, though she sounds less glad than concerned. Damn it. Did Jett say the thing about nothing particularly awful happening twice? Now Burnham probably thinks she’s traumatized and in denial or something. Which—is she?

No, she doesn’t think so, or not badly, anyway. What she’s getting at with ‘the nothing particularly awful happened’ is that nothing particularly awful _did_ happen, no torture or violation or serious injuries on either side.

But, all right, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a hell of a fight, still.

That impossibly tall settler, standing over Tracy with a knife…

Jett shakes herself, pulling her mind back to the present. _It’s over, Reno. It’s over, so get over it. Be the temporally linear one yourself for a change._ “So, how’d it all shake out up there in space, Commander?” she asks.

“Gratifyingly anticlimactic, Commander,” Burnham returns, a wry smile in her voice. “All the two of you missed were a few hours of tense meetings, and with only one of us getting to do any meeting at that. The other side’s diplomatic protocols demanded that they meet with only one leader at a time, and they placed priority on speaking with the direct commanding officer of the vessel, so Pike got to go in and be talked at for three hours while Georgiou waited around in the adjoining conference room bored out of her mind.”

“Oh, Georgiou was bored, was she? She should have come with us; she would’ve had a real blast.”

Jett can practically hear Burnham roll her eyes. “Say that to her and I’ll put you on gamma-shift transporter room duty for a week, Reno. I’m trying to sell her on the new ‘captains don’t leave the ship unless absolutely necessary’ protocol that’s catching on with some of the Federation’s allies.”

“Really? And how’s that working out for you?”

Burnham’s silence speaks volumes.

Jett snickers. “Don’t worry, we won’t tell her how helpless and delicate us non-professional-ass-kickers are without her.”

Tracy walks over, holding out her hand for the communicator, and Jett cedes it to her. As Tracy begins to give her a more detailed report on the condition of the stunned hostiles to pass along to to incoming medical staff, Jett heads back into the shuttle, grabbing a PADD to get down a written list of repair statuses and known issues for the coming briefing.

Tracy follows her inside a few minutes later, Burnham still chatting to her on the line, and starts tossing the personal items she brought on the away mission into a bag. “Relief team’s beaming down in two, Commander,” she calls over to Jett.

Jett, who hadn’t bothered to pack anything other than a toothbrush, heads outside to wait for the new team. Shadows are lengthening in the lavender sunlight as the planet’s thirty-hour day creeps slowly into late afternoon, and a soft, summery breeze stirs the leaves in the trees around them. Even strewn with pissy unconscious enemy attackers, Jett reflects, the clearing really is beautiful.

Tracy moves to stand beside her as a shimmer in the air heralds the arrival of the new team, and Jett grins as Lieutenant Owosekun, Chief Engineer Ramirez, Dr. Cooper, one of the medics, Britta, and Jett’s closest friend in Engineering, Tuya, materialize in front of them.

“Another thrilling day in Starfleet, huh?” Ramirez inquires, raising an eyebrow and glancing around at the stunned enemies.

“You know it, Chief,” Jett tells her boss, stepping forward to hand her the PADD.

It takes another twenty minutes for Jett to brief Ramirez, Owosekun and Tuya, and Tracy is waiting with her bag when she is finished. “Ready to head back to our favorite starship?” she asks with a wry smile.

Jett throws her a lopsided grin. “Compared to this planet? I’d say so.”

Tracy smiles at her, a real smile this time, and Jett feels a swoop in her stomach as she smiles back.

“Good working with you, Commander,” Tracy says as she glances around the clearing, the quiet formality of her words seeming to encompass the magnitude what all that has transpired here, both physically and emotionally.

Well, maybe not _all_ that has transpired. While Jett is... _pretty_ sure of what she read in Tracy’s eyes after Jett called her beautiful, that particular emotional component has a pin in it for now.

“Good working with you too, Doc,” she replies softly.

Tracy smiles, flipping the communicator open as she shoulders her bag. “Away team to Discovery. Two to beam up.”

The lavender landscape dematerializes around them and Discovery’s transporter room shimmers into place in its stead, its familiar paneled walls and cool filtered air wrapping around them with the familiarity of home. Georgiou and Burnham are standing in front of the transporter pad to greet them, both with their hands folded behind their backs in a posture official enough that Jett has to bite her lip to keep from laughing.

“Welcome home, away team,” Burnham says formally, then breaks into a wide smile. “It’s good to see you again.”

“And you,” Tracy returns, as she and Jett step forward off the platform. “We were very glad to hear that crisis was averted up here.”

“Indeed,” Burnham nods. “It wasn’t easy for any of us to know you were stuck on the planet’s surface without the ability to contact us. And we didn’t even know just how much danger you were in.” Her expression turns somber as she gazes back and forth between Tracy and Jett as though confirming their presence in front of her, alive and unharmed, just as Jett and Tracy did earlier with each other.

Georgiou nods, eyes stormy. “I knew we shouldn’t have sent you down there without at least one security officer. Scanning technology is not infallible. From this point onward, I plan to make sure that at least one member of security division is with any away team, no matter how low-risk the mission, or what scans do or do not show.” She shakes her head sharply. “If no one else is free, I’m beaming down myself.”

Burnham sighs, giving Georgiou a look, and Jett feels a pang of sympathy for her. From a tactical and ethical perspective, she reflects, one could debate the merits of a ship’s commanding officers staying back from danger until the sun went down, but on a visceral level, if someone Jett loved had once died violently in front of her, she knows she would want to keep that person within the relative safety of bridges and conference rooms, too.

Burnham's visible ire melts away a moment later, however, as Jett and Tracy step down from the transporter pad, Tracy blinking with exhaustion.

“And both of you had a chance to mend your injuries?” she confirms, sliding back into formal first officer mode.

Jett nods. “Yep. The doc wants me to go to sickbay for a final check of my mended concussion before bed tonight, but we healed each other up aside from that.”

Tracy nods in confirmation. “It was quite the altercation, but what matters is that we made it through unscathed, and, based on my quick exams, so did our attackers. Including the one I stunned twice, and the one Reno bit,” she adds, with a wobble in her voice that might be a laugh or a sob. Or maybe just a stifled yawn. Now that they’re finally back on the Discovery, with its familiar walls and familiar filtered air and familiar faces here to greet them and take things from here, Jett can feel exhaustion seeping into her in a way the adrenaline of being on the planet did not allow, her eyelids fluttering even as residual energy keeps her fingers tapping restlessly against her thigh. She wonders if Tracy is feeling something similar.

Georgiou glances between Tracy and Jett, taking in the dirt scraped into their ripped uniforms and the places where cooling sweat has stuck stray strands of hair to throats and temples. Her eyes are serious but gentle, and Jett has the sense that, as a veteran of decades of combat both interstellar and up-close-and-personal, Georgiou knows better than almost anyone on Discovery what it means to fight and survive and be left tired and frenetic with residual energy and with your world shifted just slightly on its axis, even if things ended as safe and well as it was possible for them to.

“Have you done grounding yet?” she asks.

“Huh? Oh, no, not yet,” Tracy replies.

“Do you want to?” Burnham asks.

“Sounds like a good idea,” Tracy replies with an appreciative smile, dropping her bag and taking a step forward.

Jett squints from Tracy to Georgiou to Burnham, feeling like they are abruptly conversing in another language, her puzzlement growing as Georgiou opens her arms and Tracy steps forward to embrace her.

“I thought grounding was, like, counting five things you can see and four things you can lick, not snuggling in a transporter room,” she ventures, eyeing them.

Burnham’s eyebrows lift in realization as she registers Jett’s puzzlement, and she explains, “Oh, yes, two different types of ‘grounding.’ You have the type of ‘grounding’ that’s for anxiety or dissociation, like counting with someone. Or doing that _five things you can see, four hear, three smell, two touch, one taste_ exercise,” she acknowledges, cracking a slight smile. “But after a fight, ‘grounding’ is sharing a hug or other safe mutual touch with someone else. Someone who isn’t trying to hurt you. It helps neutralize that feeling of…” She frowns. “I don’t know if there’s a word for it—not in any of the languages I know, anyway—but that feeling of being shaky and wary and keyed-up after a fight.”

“Like your nerves are jangling,” Georgiou says, over Tracy’s shoulder. “And Michael, if I remember correctly, one of the western continent languages of the Puhrum homeworld in the Epsilon V system has a word it, though I can’t remember it right now.”

“Oh, really?” Burnham’s eyes light up. “I wonder if the originating cultural group had a particularly martial history, or maybe…” She shakes her head slightly in what Jett suspects is only a temporary dismissal of these evidentially-fascinating questions, her focus visibly returning to the present moment, and finishes, “It’s not for everyone, and obviously there are times when it’s not possible, but I’ve always found it quite helpful.”

Jett raises her shoulder in a half-shrug. “You professional ass-kickers never tell the rest of us any of the good stuff. I’ll try it.”

Burnham half-holds an arm out. “Would you prefer a handshake, or a hug, or…”

“Aw, c’mere.” Jett wraps her arms around Burnham, and Burnham hugs her back. Her arms wrap securely and gently around Jett, her body warm and solid in Jett’s arms, and Jett understands what she means about _grounding_ , a term that, for Jett, brings to mind a grounding wire, all the fizzing, sparking energy safely discharging out of a system.

She and Burnham hold each other for another moment, Jett closing her eyes and taking a long, deep breath before letting go and giving Burnham an affectionate whack on the back. “Thanks, kid.”

Burnham smiles, that flash of happiness and care that spreads over her face like a newborn star. “Anytime.” Her voice turns teasing. “All you need to do is win a fight while stranded on an away mission.”

Jett chuckles. “I think once was all I needed to cross that particular experience off my bucket list.”

Beside her, Georgiou has smoothly hefted Tracy’s duffle bag onto her own shoulder before Tracy could pick it up again after their hug, and Jett is surprised to find herself battling the tiniest twinge of jealousy, an emotion even more unusual for her than getting turned on mid-crisis. She laughs silently at herself. Is it even _romantic_ jealousy at all, or just the deep and fundamental desire to be the one carrying another woman’s stuff for her rather than letting someone else having the honor of doing so?

Jett and Burnham follow Tracy and Georgiou out into the hallway, Jett still grinning to herself. Georgiou _was_ the one stuck in conference rooms for the last few hours, and Jett is willing to magnanimously admit that she deserves the chance to do a bit of chivalrous bag-carrying after so long unable to do anything proactive to help.

“Speaking of grounding,” Georgiou says, adjusting the bag in question higher on her shoulder as she walks, “Dr. Pollard and I have been working on letting more people outside of security track know about grounding and other helpful ways of caring for oneself and others after an emergency. Starfleet personnel get basic training on psychologically coping with emergencies at the Academy, but not only is many people’s Academy training now decades out of date, an argument could be made that Starfleet as a whole doesn’t take the psychological aspect of responding to emergencies as seriously as it could.” She sighs. “At least, on this ship, maybe we can finally start to do something about that.”

“Yeah, I remember you talking about that,” Jett says to Tracy, dipping her chin in acknowledgement.

She also remembers Tracy expressing frustration at how, as she put it, ‘goal-focused’ Georgiou and their other colleagues in the security and medical divisions alike could be about the effort. _Psychological care isn’t just about slapping a bandaid on a wound and then declaring it healed,_ she had said, poking the edge of her cooling mug of tea, and Jett had resisted the urge to point out that Tracy, in all her own physician linearity, often seemed to talk about psychological care in a pretty cause-and-effect if-then fashion, too.

She is, of course, is hardly going to bring any of those details up now, and Tracy smiles. “Yes, as I recall your reply was something along the lines of ‘Yeah, plenty of people on this boat don’t realize brains need more care and feeding than a pet rock. Go get ‘em, Doc.’”

Burnham and Georgiou burst out laughing, and Jett rolls her eyes. “Yeah, well, if someone gets it mixed up and licks their pet rock five times instead of having their brain hug someone, don’t come crying to me.”

Tracy groans, rubbing a hand theatrically to her temple, and for a few moments the group walks in companionable silence.

“Untranslatable!” Georgiou says happily as they turn the corner toward the turbolift, then swears at the universal translator. “Oh, turn off for five seconds, you fucking thing.” The computer beeps cheerfully, and she says, quickly, “Ditaal, that was it, ditaal.”

Burnham looks delighted. “That’s fascinating. Don’t worry, I’m not actually going to bring up Sapir-Whorf, but I do wonder at the extent to which having a word for that specific physical/psychological/emotional state of being informs how cognizant people are of when they’re experiencing it.”

“Of course you’re fascinated by that,” Georgiou says drily. “You grew up in a culture that barely distinguishes between emotions beyond denying that you have any.”

Tracy chuckles, but Jett sees the quick look of hurt that flashes in Burnham’s eyes at the words, and finds herself thinking of earlier, when she so easily lumped Georgiou into some fictional category of flawless good-ness. Back here, now, in the cool, climate-controlled halls of the Discovery, where doctors and warriors work together but perhaps not in all the ways that they should, and sacrifice twists into destruction and compliments into assumptions, it’s all too easy to be reminded that things are rarely as simple as that.

Quietly, she bumps her arm against Burnham’s as they trail Tracy and Georgiou, and Burnham glances at her, her huge brown eyes startled. Jett grimaces slightly at her, and Burnham’s mouth twists into a matching grimace, making the barest trace of an eyeroll as she glances forward at Georgiou, her face seeming to relax into some of the dry humor that was in her voice earlier on the com line as she made fun of her former captain for sitting around bored in conference rooms.

Jett smiles at her, reaching out to squeeze her clumsily on the shoulder, and for a highly alarming half of a second, Burnham looks as though she’s about to burst into tears. But in instants, the expression is gone, leaving a minute smile of gratitude in its wake, before that too disappears back into interested neutrality as Tracy says, “Speaking of the aftermath of missions, it was certainly a welcome surprise to be able to beam right back up to Discovery’s transporter room; I thought we were in for a difficult ascent in a rescue shuttle at best. From what I gathered about the interference from those clouds, Ramirez, Tilly and Owosekun have a lot to be proud of.”

“They sure do,” Jett agrees.

Georgiou nods. “Owosekun does some of the swiftest and most creative analysis I’ve ever seen. It’s no wonder that she’s been instrumental in so many missions. And I can see why Tilly was fast-tracked through her final year at the Academy. Her breadth of knowledge is outstanding.”

“They’re amazing, aren’t they?” Burnham agrees happily. “Ramirez has been making noises about joining the reclamation away mission in the Eta system next week herself since gravimetric phenomena are one of her specialties from her postgraduate research, and I’m going to recommend to Pike that Owosekun runs the shipside engineering support crew since she’s so good with that kind of quick, innovative analysis in highly variable situations.”

“And where am I gonna be during the gravimetric shenanigans?” Jett inquires.

“I was planning to put you on Owosekun’s team, given that you’re quite the creative thinker yourself,” Burnham says, flashing a grin. “And I’ll need someone experienced to hold down the fort if the medical staff clear me to join the away team. It would be ideal to have you, as an experienced commander, and Owosekun, as head of Ops, back on the ship while I back up Ramirez, Rhys and Stamets on the away team, since Rhys needs someone else with solid tactical experience along and it’d be helpful if that person also has a good grasp of gravimetric variance. Besides,” she adds with wry formality, as though making a self-deprecating joke like any other, “It’s already been nearly a month since I last nearly died on an away mission; my hip is nearly good as new, and it’s about time I put myself back into the away mission rotation.”

There’s that damn sentence again, spoken by the woman herself, no less, and Jett is mid-wince and trying to figure out what to say when Georgiou beats her to it with a gentle _tch_ noise. “No, it’s not. You try to keep _me_ safe on this ship, as though I’ll shatter into glass if I so much as step foot on a planet, while you go putting yourself into danger as though no one is here panicking about your _own_ safe return.” She shakes her head. “No dangerous away missions until your injuries are _fully_ healed _and_ we’ve--” There is a miniscule pause as Georgiou’s eyes flick toward Tracy and Jett, and she appears to reroute slightly-- “had a chance to all spend some time together until another crisis finds us. Right, Tracy?”

“Until your hip is fully healed,” Tracy confirms gently. “You’ll stay here. With us.”

Jett has the sneaking suspicion, or certainly the hope, that the cut-off more private sentence was something along the lines of _until we’ve found you a counselor who isn’t just as fucked up by the Starfleet self-sacrifice mystique as you are,_ or, unlikelier but better still, _until we’ve gotten you a captaincy on some other ship where you won’t have be surrounded by all this USS Discovery-brand mushroom-flavored compassion-fatigue-adjacent creepiness in the first place, and also will be at least somewhat guilt-tripped into staying safe for the sake of being able to lead your crew, just the way you keep trying guilt-trip me,_ though admittedly the latter is probably too much to wish for.

The warmth and the fierce protectiveness in Georgiou’s eyes as she looks at Burnham are plain as day, and Jett finds herself grateful to be reminded that someone in Burnham’s life is looking out for her safety amid the coldness of the Discovery just as much as Burnham is trying to look out for, well, Georgiou’s.

It’s plain now and every day that Georgiou cares about Burnham, and Jett knows that it’s likely that Georgiou just happened to miss the flash of hurt on Burnham’s face when she joked so easily about her Vulcan upbringing.

But how _many_ times has she _just happened_ to miss it?

Maybe, Jett reflects, she needs to ask Captain Georgiou to sit down for coffee and a _conversation_ with her some time.

Or maybe, she amends, shaking herself mentally, going in guns blazing against a woman she doesn’t know very well on behalf of another woman also she doesn't know very well would only have the end result of causing more chaos in Burnham’s life. Maybe, Jett reflects, glancing at Burnham’s veiled eyes as the four officers come to a pause at the turbolift, the person she really ought to talk with is Burnham herself.

“Well, speaking of away missions most perilous,” Burnham jokes, her voice sliding back into her formal-first-officer register as she addresses Tracy and Jett, “it’s very good to have you two back alive and well.” She smiles at both of them, her eyes luminous with emotion. “Make sure you make it to sickbay to get your concussion checked out sooner rather than later, Commander,” she adds firmly, eyeing Jett, while Georgiou and Tracy nod officiously beside her.

“All right, all right, I’ll go as soon as I’ve eaten,” Jett says, raising her hands in mock surrender, as though her own visit to sickbay has ever been in any doubt; those salamander assholes didn’t kill her, and she’s hardly about to let a concussion finish the job. “Thanks for meeting us and grounding us and yada-ya,” she adds to Burnham and Georgiou. “We’ll have our full reports on your desks first thing tomorrow morning, eh, Doc?”

“Tomorrow afternoon. We’re doing equipment audits in sickbay tomorrow,” Tracy says, raising an eyebrow, “and I doubt I’ll have time to write a full report on Commander Reno’s _unique_ hand-to-hand combat tactics after dinner tonight if I want to keep my eyes open tomorrow.”

“Naps first, reports on biting jackasses later,” Jett confirms with a grin.

“Well, then I suppose we’ll leave you to it,” Georgiou says approvingly. “Commander, join me for a late lunch?”

As Burnham and Georgiou trot off toward the mess hall together, Tracy pokes the turbolift button and she and Jett shuffle into the lift. Despite Jett’s growing exhaustion, she feels instantly wide awake at suddenly being alone with Tracy in the relatively small space, and--

Is it her imagination, or is Tracy standing just a _bit_ closer to her than colleagues would typically stand to colleagues in an otherwise-empty lift?

“You know, it occurred to me, when Georgiou suggested grounding,” Tracy murmurs, glancing at Jett sidelong, “that you and I never did share so much as a handshake or a clap on the back after our big ass-kicking extravaganza. You know,” she adds, “even before I officially knew about the concept of post-emergency grounding described as such, I’ve found that after the roughest situations I’ve been through in the ‘fleet, violent or otherwise, I and the people around me tended to offer hugs and handshakes and so forth around to those who wanted them. Usually asking first, of course, since for all its flaws, Starfleet’s pretty good about training us all to ask before physical contact. So it just felt so--familiar to me, the first time someone in the know told me about it, the concept of asking for a grounding touch or offering one. So many people just _do so,_ ” she finishes, as she and Jett step out onto Deck 9 and head towards Tracy’s quarters, the path as familiar to Jett as all the other times she’s walked Tracy to her door after a long late dinner.

 _How often,_ Jett wonders abruptly, the question somehow hitting her for the first time as they approach Tracy’s door, _do most friendly colleagues walk each other all the way back to one colleague’s quarters after a long late dinner, anyway?_

Tracy is still talking. “Yet you and I managed not to, and I’ve been thinking about it, and I remembered how I was going to offer you a hand up, but that was when we figured out you were too damn concussed even to be able to grab my hand successfully.”

Distracted from this suddenly-burning question, Jett bursts into laughter, remembering swiping hopefully at Tracy’s floating hand. “I was so mystified when it seemed like your hand was right there and I just couldn’t—couldn’t—”

Tracy is laughing too, and Jett wonders if this, too, is something akin to grounding; going back over what happened to find the bits where the warmth and the humor can sink back in amid all the awfulness that transpired. She isn’t, she finds, as she probes her memories cautiously, too inclined to think too closely over the fight itself—not yet—but the memory of the missing hand feels like a safe-enough awful thing to laugh at, now.

She grins as their shared laughter subsides. “Thwarted by cranial swelling.”

“Indeed.” They’ve arrived at Tracy’s door, and Tracy smiles at her, leaning against the left side of the doorframe.

Jett leans her hip against the other side. “You know,” she says, deliberately, after a moment, “we could always make up for that now.”

Something sparks in Tracy’s eyes. “A grounding hug for the road?” she asks, one corner of her mouth quirking up as she lifts an eyebrow.

“I think I’m already all grounded. Let’s call it a hug for luck,” Jett says softly, looking her in the eye. “Luck for whatever interesting places we’d like life to take us next.”

 _Oh. Oh, I’m really doing this, aren’t I?_ Jett’s brain follows up a moment later.

 _Yep,_ she tells it.

Time is frozen, an entirely different kind of jangly energy shooting through Jett’s body as Tracy looks at Jett and Jett looks at Tracy.

“You know,” Tracy murmurs, taking a step closer to Jett, “I always _have_ been a believer in making my own luck.”

Jett smiles, unpeeling herself from her side of the doorway and stepping so close to Tracy that she can feel the warmth of her body in front of hers. “If it’s luck we’re seeking,” she says softly, “I can think of a gesture somewhat more traditional than a hug.”

“Starship or sailing ship,” Tracy returns, lip quirking in a smile, “who are we to turn down the traditions that might help guide our vessel to fair winds and following tides?”

Jett reaches for Tracy’s hand, the shock of the sudden warmth of Tracy’s skin against hers reverberating from Jett’s hand to her heart. She suddenly feels glad that she did in fact do actual, de-nerve-jangling grounding with Burnham first—holding Tracy’s hand is the opposite of grounding; it’s more like licking a battery. “And does tradition give pointers on whether the foul-mouthed sailor should kiss her lady’s lips or her lady’s hand?” she asks.

“I don’t know about tradition,” Tracy murmurs, “but this lady hasn’t waited months for a kiss on the knuckles.”

Jett laughs as she closes the distance between them, and they’re both grinning as lips and bodies meet in a tangle of warmth and softness. Jett’s hands come to rest against the sides of Tracy’s waist, and Tracy’s arms wrapping around her back are the most perfect thing she’s felt in months.

Their bodies melt together as though they are merely reuniting after a long absence, even as their questing lips fumble to find a rhythm between kissing and smiling at each other. Finally they find one, Tracy closing her eyes as their kiss deepens. Jett keeps her own eyes open, half-crosseyed but unwilling to miss a moment of the way the tension on Tracy’s forehead smooths all the way out and her closed eyes crinkle into a smile that looks something close to bliss.

They pull apart for breath with arms still tangled around each other, smiling. Tracy reaches up to caress Jett’s cheek lightly, and Jett’s breath catches at the touch.

“O, then, dear saint,” Tracy murmurs, a mischievous smile shimmering in her eyes as she leans forward to murmur against Jett’s ear, “let lips do what hands do.”

“You know,” Jett says, pulling back just enough to gesture emphatically with a finger, “I’m pretty sure that’s another damn Shakespeare quote, but I’m not even mad.”

Tracy laughs and pulls her in for another kiss, and for a time there it feels that there is nothing in the universe outside the warmth of lips and foreheads and hands melding against each other.

At last they step back apart, breathless and grinning. Leaning forward, Jett presses one more kiss to the side of Tracy’s mouth, and Tracy sighs in contentment.

“Dinner tomorrow?” Jett asks, and though it’s a question she’s tossed to Tracy plenty of times in the months since she came on board, the words now hold a different significance entirely.

“Sounds like a plan,” Tracy says, smiling. Her eyes flicker downwards almost shyly before she meets Jett’s gaze again, and when she does, the happiness in her eyes almost takes Jett’s breath away.

Tracy Pollard looking at her, at Jett Reno, with that degree of happiness…

Jett blinks, feeling a broad, unselfconscious grin spread across her own face. “See you tomorrow, Trace,” she says, and if it’s possible, Tracy’s expression grows even more radiant.

“See you tomorrow, Jett,” she says, and Jett can feel herself smiling what might be the widest she has since she hitched a ride off that asteroid. “Sleep well.”

“You too,” she says, stepping forward to give Tracy one more peck on the cheek before turning to walk down the hall.

Halfway toward the curve that will take her around Discovery’s starboard section toward the turbolift, she glances back. Tracy is still standing in her doorway, smile as brilliant as a nebula. She raises a hand in farewell, and Jett grins, waving back, before stepping around the bend and towards the turbolift that will take her to sickbay.

Might as well get the concussion check over with, and besides, she’s floating just a bit too high off the ground to want to return to her own empty beige quarters right now.

It occurs to her that she might be about to run into Hugh, who will have no idea that Jett’s face and his esteemed colleague’s face were just sharing the same spatial coordinates, and she grins to herself. Now Hugh isn’t the only one who’s going to have a paramour causing chaos in sickbay--though hopefully, in Jett’s case, only chaos of the benevolent kind.

Well, Jett reflects, smirking to herself, _mostly_ benevolent, anyway.

Grinning, she punches the button for the lift that will take her to Deck 4. She might be an undercover paramour for the moment, but, depending on who’s in the mess hall during she and Tracy’s dinner tomorrow, it won’t be long before Hugh and the whole ship knows.

 _The whole ship._ Jett’s smile fades from her face again as she steps into the lift, thinking of her conversation with Tracy from inside the paneling of their damaged shuttle.

Living and working on the USS Discovery hasn’t always been easy these past eight months, nor is kissing one of the best—by her _own_ definition—people onboard about to fix that.

But today’s newly-forged connections between her and Tracy, romantic and otherwise, feel like a new point of warmth cutting through the chill, and the reminder of Georgiou’s attempt to get Pike court-martialled and new knowledge of sickbay staff’s fraught midnight meeting has been a welcome reminder that Tracy and Jett aren't the only ones onboard who can see Discovery’s metaphorical rust.

As she steps from the lift and makes her way toward the doors of sickbay, Jett smiles again. While there’s never any way to be sure exactly what any day on the USS Discovery will hold, at least she knows that tomorrow--Sunday--will hold dinner with Tracy. And a fledgling but ever-growing sense of community. And probably some more dilithium matrix diagnostics.

Everything else, well--she’ll take it as it comes.

Smiling crookedly, she remembers the feeling of Tracy standing back-to-back against her; Tracy patting her shoulder; Tracy melting against her in front of the door to her quarters.

Whatever tomorrow brings, at least neither of them will face it alone.


End file.
